This book seeks, through an examination of the form and content of his texts, to extend our understanding of Adolf Loos and his role in the struggle to define the nature of modernity in Vienna at the turn of the nineteenth century. It makes extensive use of primary sources including archive material and newspaper reports, which serve to shed new light on the way in which Loos's writings are embedded in their socio-cultural context. Drawing on insights from German and Austrian studies, sociology and cultural history, this book offers a genuinely interdisciplinary approach to a figure who himself operated in an interdisciplinary fashion.

In Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century the question of what it meant to be modern was a heated topic of debate. Focusing on interior design, fashion and photography, as well as on painting and architecture, this study casts fresh light on the vital role of the arts in these debates. The 'new' art and literature was crucial in defining a distinctive Viennese modernity while at the same time challenging preconceptions about modern urban life. Many artists and writers produced work that questioned and undermined oppositions between city and country, interior spaces and panoramic views, masculinity and femininity. Issues of gender and the representation of the body were particularly important in establishing professional identities for some of Vienna's most prominent figures, including the Secessionist painters Gustav Klimt and Carl Moll, designers such as Adolf Loos and Emilie Flöge, as well as the poet and feuilletonist Peter Altenberg. Intellectual life in turn-of-the-century Vienna has often been characterised as a retreat from the public sphere. This book demonstrates how - even in its ostensibly most private manifestations - Viennese Modernism involved a highly performative set of practices aimed at an international audience.

First full-length study of Loos's texts available in English Based on original research and makes extensive use of primary sources Offers a genuinely inter-disciplinary approach

Explores the central role of Jewish patrons as shapers of Viennese modernism

Filling a critical gap in Vienna 1900 studies, this book offers a new reading of fin-de-si?e culture in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy by looking at the unusual and widespread preoccupation with embroidery, fabrics, clothing, and fashion - both literally and metaphorically. The author resurrects lesser known critics, practitioners, and curators from obscurity, while also discussing the textile interests of better known figures, notably Gottfried Semper and Alois Riegl. Spanning the 50-year life of the Dual Monarchy, this study uncovers new territory in the history of art history, insists on the crucial place of women within modernism, and broadens the cultural history of Habsburg Central Europe by revealing the complex relationships among art history, women, and Austria-Hungary. Rebecca Houze surveys a wide range of materials, from craft and folk art to industrial design, and includes overlooked sources-from fashion magazines to World's Fair maps, from exhibition catalogues to museum lectures, from feminist journals to ethnographic collections. Restoring women to their place at the intersection of intellectual and artistic debates of the time, this book weaves together discourses of the academic, scientific, and commercial design communities with middle-class life as expressed through popular culture.

The Viennese café was a key site of urban modernity around 1900. In the rapidly growing city it functioned simultaneously as home and workplace, affording opportunities for both leisure and intellectual exchange. This volume explores the nature and function of the coffeehouse in the social, cultural, and political world of fin-de-siècle Vienna. Just as the café served as a creative meeting place within the city, so this volume initiates conversations between different disciplines focusing on Vienna at the beginning of the twentieth century. Contributions are drawn from the fields of social and cultural history, literary studies, Jewish studies and art, and architectural and design history. A fresh perspective is also provided by a selection of comparative articles exploring coffeehouse culture elsewhere in Eastern Europe.

Surviving photographs of Jewish Viennese men during the fin-de-siècle and interwar periods – both the renowned cultural luminaries and their many anonymous coreligionists – all share a striking sartorial detail: the tailored suit. Yet, until now, the adoption of the tailored suit and its function in the formation of modern Jewish identities remains under-researched. Jews in Suits uses a rich range of written and visual sources, including literary fiction and satire, 'ego-documents', photography, trade catalogues, invoices, and department store culture, to propose a new narrative of men, fashion, and their Jewish identities. It reveals that dressing in a modern manner was not simply a matter of assimilation, but rather a way of developing new models of Jewish subjectivity beyond the externally prescribed notion of 'the Jew'. Drawing upon fashionable dress, folk costume, religious dress, avant-garde, oppositional dress, typologies which are often considered separate from one another, it proposes a new way of reading men and clothing cultures within an iconic cultural milieu, offering insights into the relationship of clothing and grooming to the understanding of the self.