Exhibition Horror Patriae
Gallery of Timid Modernity
With its eclectic historicism, 19th-century architecture gave individual and state customers a vast palette of aesthetics to identify with. Often, the choice of style was a political statement. For the multiethnic Habsburg monarchy, neoclassicism was the universal language of bureaucracy and power, allegedly neutral and nonnational. This was precisely the reason it became universally hated in the mid-19th century, when the “German national” style was championed by the oppositional bourgeoisie. This clash defined the facade of Graz’s town hall and its reception, shown in this room.
The German national style became the biggest part of the Joanneum’s arts and crafts collection. Its founder, Karl Lacher (1850–1908), concentrated almost exclusively on the so-called Nuremberg style in his choice of furniture and applied art. As always in the Joanneum, these collections were meant to educate local craftspeople.
Paradoxically, this obsession with “old German” style found no sympathy with the cultural bosses of the Third Reich who took the reins after 1938. To them, it represented kitsch and coziness, a humanism they wanted to eradicate and replace with a more modern, ideologically and formally clean aesthetic. The history of Styrian cross-stitching exhibited in this room was also shaped by these pressures.
The end of the project of a Greater German Reich did not cancel old German taste. But after 1945, an alternative and more modern dream of former grandeur, one specific to Styria, emerged: Inner Austria. It was an old administrative name for Styria and several regions that used to have a German-speaking population but now belonged to Italy or Slovenia. Even if Inner Austria was already a complete fiction in the 1950s and 1960s, this fiction was behind many cultural initiatives of the Styrian politician Hanns Koren (1906–1985). One of these was steirischer herbst, another the trigon biennial, which established official cross-border collaborations with Italy and Yugoslavia. Works by Paolo Tessari and Franco Vaccari landed in Neue Galerie through this context, while Drago Julius Prelog belonged to those artists whose background in a border zone was rather left unspoken.
