Vienna is the site of historically important museums and innovative displays, yet relatively little research on their unique history has been made available in English-language publications.Footnote ¹ The most widely known studies of museums and display history focus on the histories of France, England, Germany, and the United States.Footnote ² None of these models applies easily to Imperial Austria or to the First and Second Republics.Footnote ³ The purpose of this forum is to present new research on Vienna's histories of display and material culture and to situate it within a context of very recent Austrian activity in this field, including a 2014 spate of exhibitions about exhibitions in Vienna.Footnote ⁴ New research coming out of Austria contains surprising information on when and for whom collections were open. Unlike the better-known history of the Louvre, in which objects were liberated to be freely shared with the new citizenry after the French Revolution, royal Austrian collections were already open to the public three days a week in 1777.Footnote ⁵ For a fee, which could be shared, tourists and citizens could visit the collections in the Stallburg as early as 1702.Footnote ⁶

Austria thus offers a different set of circumstances for examining museum and display history. Among its innovative displays was the Ambras collection, which was organized by material, with objects displayed in a hierarchy of three categories: antiquity, natural, and man-made objects, the latter of which included fine art and machines. The model for the Baroque Kunstkammer was not a temple of history but a laboratory and a playroom according to Horst Bredekamp.Footnote ⁷ After Leopold I (1640–1705, ruled from 1657) inherited the newly centralized collections, the Habsburgs gradually moved these objects, along with parts of the Prague collections, into new museums, some adapted from existing architecture and some purpose-built, such as the Arsenal or Military Museum (1849–1856) and the Kunsthistorisches Museum (opened 1891), while continuing to expand the collections to include ethnology, folk arts of the empire, natural history, works on paper, and antiquities.

By 1900, Vienna had become a city of museums—and almost a museum itself. As Karl Kraus quipped, “The streets of Vienna are paved with culture, the streets of other cities with asphalt,” thereby prophesying, for example, the new role that the Werkbund estate (1932) would take in the museumification of the city.Footnote ⁸ This is the subject of the essay by Anita Aigner, who investigates the Vienna Werkbund estate of houses, which were built by famous architects like Adolf Loos in 1932 as case studies in affordable housing. She examines the estate as a lived-in monument, investigating user appropriation and the residents' attitudes toward conservation. The other essays in this forum connect to other ways that everyday life in Vienna has become a representation of itself, specifically focusing on folk art and ethnographic displays, not of Aztecs or other “others,” but of the ethnic groups of the empire. This display mania was part of the process in the construction and constitution of groups as “ethnic” and reinforced the very idea that there were ethnic groups in the first place.Footnote ⁹ Diana Reynolds-Cordileone presents an analysis of how Habsburg administrators cultivated and promoted Bosnian culture through displays of the newly conquered land. Using a form of soft power, they deployed mechanisms of the “exhibitionary complex” to represent Bosnia to Vienna in dance, exhibitions, and consumer goods.Footnote ¹⁰ In Cordileone's findings, however, it was Austrians who redesigned Bosnian rugs and consumer goods, had them fabricated in Bosnia, and then sold them in Vienna as ethnic products and exotic souvenirs. In Cordileone's tale of exchange within the empire and its Crownlands, objects are transformed into commodities, and weapons are turned into souvenirs or trinkets simply by changing their context or use-value. She tells the story not just from the point of view of Vienna and the Western consumption of these ideas, images, and products, but also from the point of view of Bosnians and their resistance to some of these fabrications and alterations.Footnote ¹¹

Reinhard Johler analyzes the specific nature of the Museum for Austrian Folk Life and Folk Art and its development in Austria-Hungary, arguing that before 1914, the type was distinct from other European models. This lost museum type focused on difference and the self-representation of ethnic groups in the monarchy, a type unique to Austria because of its political situation as an empire that conceived of itself as unifying several different cultures and peoples.Footnote ¹² Unlike Germany, Hungary, or Russia, there was no official nationality to which other peoples had to conform or serve as minorities. Other museums of this type in Europe sought to tell a story of historical development, rather than celebrating contemporaneous ethnic differences. After 1918, Austria had little reason to further this model, and the collections were viewed as relics of a past empire.

As Johler reminds us, the ethnographic object is by definition created by the collector/curator, who selects the object and changes its use-value to an exhibition value; such objects would otherwise remain in use until discarded. The transformation of the value of an object from its use- to its display value finds its greatest tension in the Werkbund display of the 1930s, where the houses served simultaneously as heritage sites and as private domiciles. But it was not necessarily a new thing to put private living quarters on display. By 1846, the imperial palace had opened the former living quarters of Maria Theresa and Joseph II to the public at certain times of the year, a fact that might comfort or alarm the present inhabitants of the Werkbund estate.Footnote ¹³ In his essay on Vienna's topography of culture over asphalt, Kraus joked about the importance of display value over use-value, complaining that even the “people who serve us” have become Sehenswürdigkeiten or “sights worth seeing”: “The Kutscher (coachman) is one-of-a-kind and I don't move forward ... the coal man sings happily on his wagon, and I freeze.”Footnote ¹⁴ In fact, Vienna's version of museum vision may have been best described in this essay, a thick description of the humorous kind found only in the pages of Die Fackel. In it, Kraus described a kind of a cultural time travel in which “a few steps from the night café” one could “reach the middle ages, the Stephansdom, the tomb of medieval minnesinger Neidhart von Reuenthal and a one-horse carriage stand.” Visitors to a champagne bar could, upon exiting, encounter a monument to Charlemagne adjacent to “omnibus transport in every direction.” Kraus concluded, “the past reaches into the present, which explains the well-known Viennese lack of punctuality. Train times are a few minutes behind city time here but city time is a few centuries behind Central European time. In the past we are far ahead of other peoples, indeed it is exactly this colorful mix of times that makes our city so attractive.”Footnote ¹⁵ The colorful juxtaposition of times described by Kraus was visible not only on the Ringstrasse, with its representative display of architectural styles from the Gothic to the Baroque, but also the Hofburg, which was permeable. Rather than being walled off and private as imperial residences often were, open passages cut through it (the Schweizerhof, etc.), turning the complex into a visible monument to the Habsburgs, who did not rely on newly invented iconographies like other royals, but rather on their collections and residence to refer to Habsburg might.Footnote ¹⁶

Not only was the city of Vienna undergoing museumification, but so too were its imperial collections in their references to the glory of the Habsburgs. Debra Meijers explains that from an international, comparative point of view, the museum situation in Vienna was highly unusual.Footnote ¹⁷ Keeping the imperial collections together, as the Habsburgs did—first in the Belvedere and then later in in the twin museums, or “huge cabinet of curiosities” as Carl Schorske called them—was a comparative anomaly.Footnote ¹⁸ The Kunsthistorisches Museum (KHM) kept the painting department as one of many, whereas in the rest of Europe, collections were being separated. Rather than becoming a universal museum, it was more like a private Kunstkammer, referencing the Habsburgs not only throughout the building's decoration, but also in its location.Footnote ¹⁹ The art history museum faced its twin, a museum of natural history, and connected to the Hofburg by proximity and the presiding statue of Maria Theresa between them, establishing imperial dominance over civic space, which, as Schorske notes with some irony, was created at the very moment of political ascendancy for constitutional liberalism.Footnote ²⁰

The recent reinstallation of the Kunstkammer, which takes up half an entire floor of the museum, achieves the status of a meta-display, referencing not only the iconography of the KHM, which was decorated and conceived to memorialize the history of Habsburg collecting, but also the original uses of objects in the Kunstkammer setting. Sabine Haag directed a team to research, restore, and film the clockwork mechanisms in motion and to reinstall them in a sequence of rooms that is organized around the history of Habsburg collectors, among them Ferdinand II, Rudolf II, Leopold I, and Leopold Wilhelm. Although it is impossible to reconstruct exactly how objects were displayed together in the original Kunstkammern of Prague and Ambras, the research team has provided didactic information that reconstructs the historical conditions and original uses of the objects wherever possible, offering viewers insights into several layers of display history while deploying the most modern modes of museum technologies to impart this information. Interactive computer tablets, film, and audio guides include not just the latest research on the objects on display, but also the collectors, and even the ceiling painting that depicts them, a School of Athens-style gathering of Habsburg patrons with their favorite artists.Footnote ²¹

The Belvedere's history as a monument and museum has also been highlighted in recent exhibitions on Prince Eugen's life and collectionFootnote ²² and by ForMuse, a research group led by Gudrun Swoboda. Both the building itself and the collections in the Lower Belvedere underwent a kind of museumification during the early nineteenth century. The Ambras collection, for example, which included bezoar stones, musical instruments, Cellini's salt cellar, swords, goblets, and imperial hats blessed by the pope, was installed in the Lower Belvedere shortly before the Congress of Vienna, but by then, movement of objects and Napoleonic looting contributed to a perception that it was a “memorial in the form of a museum.”Footnote ²³ The collection no longer served as a laboratory or playroom as Bredekamp described it in its original form, but had rather become a relic of the Habsburgs' glorious past.

The theme of the collection as memorial appears in other research on the changing displays of the imperial painting collection. Swoboda discovered that the gallery of Karl VI (1720s in the Stallburg) was organized according to collector in a sequence of rooms dedicated to Habsburg emperors and Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, culminating in the achievements of Karl VI. Previous scholars had noted that it seemed to have no meaning beyond its formal splendor.Footnote ²⁴ In the case of Karl VI's painting gallery, a unique, painted itinerary exists that provides rare visual evidence of early modern installation.Footnote ²⁵ This, too, was recently restored, and a model of the gallery and works within it was taken out of storage and hung in the tradition of the secondary depot, or wall of paintings hung like a patchwork, making visible a display convention in use when the KHM first opened its doors. Using digital tools, the ForMuse team also reconstructed the 1777 painting gallery in the Upper Belvedere by closely reading the inventories, important to the team because they argue it was the first site of an art historical hang (that is, by national school and chronology). The research team has made the visual information available to other scholars who would examine the logic behind the “visible history of art,” as its first curator called it, but also published two volumes of archival-based research on the gallery.Footnote ²⁶

Recovering these now invisible, lost displays as Swoboda, Johler, Cordileone, and other scholars are doing, is of interest because these systems mediated knowledge of the world for new publics. Displays and their ordering can facilitate or prevent ways of knowing the worldFootnote ²⁷ and can function as a potential material location for investigating the relationship between museums and memory, which tends to “hover around the perimeters of scholarship of the history of museums, without being explicitly addressed.”Footnote ²⁸ Art historians in particular have been examining displays as another medium through which to analyze historical processes.Footnote ²⁹ Displays can mirror preexisting philosophies or be the agents of change for new ones. Paula Findlen, for example, suggested that early modern collections in Italy were concrete manifestations of a preexisting memory practice that privileged the mind of the collector.Footnote ³⁰ Horst Bredekamp proposed, on the other hand, that the logic of Ambras's display preceded and in fact inspired important philosophical ideas, rather than reflecting preexisting concepts: before making their discoveries, Copernicus and other scientists were inspired by displays of antique statuary and clockwork machines in Kunst- and Wunderkammern. In the words of Anthony Grafton, Bredekamp showed “that even the most sensitive and erudite cultural historians have gone wrong because they have treated visual documents as illustrations of doctrines stated ... in verbal ones, rather than as independent evidence.”Footnote ³¹

The articles in this forum contribute to filling a gap in international scholarship on the museums and display cultures of Vienna. Intersecting themes of Orientalism, colonialism, and museumification emerge, not only of the city itself, but also the Habsburg collections. Most of all, they add to our image of Vienna's rich cultures of display, an image that remains incomplete. By 1908, when Kraus wrote his essay on “sights worth seeing,” a visitor could access the Albertina (opened to the public in 1899), the art and natural history collections, the Museum of Applied Arts, numerous contemporary art exhibitions at the Künstlerhaus, Secession, Hagenbund, art dealers and other alternative venues, including the Kunstschauen and even some pioneered by women artists.Footnote ³² The Liechtenstein Palace art collection consistently outdid the KHM in visitor numbers during the nineteenth century.Footnote ³³ To this add the Museum of Austrian Folk Life and Folk Art and the ethnographic collection of Franz Ferdinand, who after his 1892/3 world trip created the largest private museum in Vienna to display the 14,000 ethnographic objects he collected.Footnote ³⁴ The anatomical wax figures at the Josephinum had been accessible since its founding in 1785, and the popular Madame Tussaud-style wax museum at the Prater (Präuscher's Panoptikum and Anatomical Museum) opened to the public in 1871 (destroyed in 1945).Footnote ³⁵ Some of these exhibitions remain intact (Josephinum), but many more have been lost.

Such is the case for numerous private art collections. Artist Anna Artaker reconstructed the Rothschild collection in a 2013/14 exhibition at the Arbeiterkammer, rendering visible in full-scale reproductions the lost world of the collection, at the spot where they once hung. “Enteignet” in 1938, the paintings are scattered throughout the world. In its spectral matter-of-fact presence, the exhibition also recalls a lost world, lost lives, and makes public the current restitution issues facing museums. It is a reminder that as objects undergo restitution, they become sites of memory, making visible the looting and theft during the Holocaust. The exhibition recalls the history of the palace as well, which became the “Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung” under Adolf Eichmann, and eventually a new building, the current Arbeiterkammer, which replaced the palace.Footnote ³⁶ Several privately owned palaces of Jewish families were made visible in film, photographs, and maps in an exhibition at the Wien Museum, which presented comprehensive coverage of the World Exhibition of 1873, its historical context, and the effects it had on the development of the city.Footnote ³⁷

Exhibitions about exhibitions, museums and collections as memorials, a city as a museum, private living quarters and homes on display, a coachman as a “sight worth seeing”—what do these all have in common? A look at the architecture of the newest addition to Vienna's “exhibitionary complex” might help. The new MuseumsQuartier references this colorful mix of times in the coding of its architecture (Ortner & Ortner, 2001). The white cube of the Leopold Museum refers to the classical modern, whereas the black basalt covering of the mumok (Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, or Museum of Modern Art Ludwig Foundation) references a newer geological strata. It rises out of the ground as if it existed before the baroque riding stalls where the new Kunsthalle is located, and its rounded shape and interior with transparent elevators refer to autonomy and the time machine.Footnote ³⁸ In fact, the architecture of the MuseumsQuartier encodes museum architecture in a meta-display of historical time, both geological and art historical. It opens the axis of the Hofburg to the plaza with Maria Theresa flanked by the twin museums, extending the Hofburg's permeability beyond the Ring. According to Friedrich Achleitner, the mumok is a time machine that makes time travel in Vienna possible—not to other dimensions, but to the present. The ambivalence and irony of its machine-like interior is that it houses the most contemporary art and the recent past of the avant-garde (i.e., the art that is best understood by the future), while rising out of the ground as if it existed before the historical center on which it stands. The mumok, then, is architecturally coded as a reverse time machine. One enters to see the present. Upon exiting, one can rejoin the past, as Karl Kraus saw it: Vienna is far ahead of other cities when it comes to the past.Footnote ³⁹ This cultural time travel and colorful mix of times are not new things of the postmodern world, but part of Vienna's long and continuing history of sophisticated, self-aware displays.