![]() 2 The strongly Jewish base of support for Secessionist and other variants of Viennese modernist design should come as no surprise to the specialist reader whom Shapira addresses as her intended audience. ![]() Shapira’s monograph adds to the corpus of literature, first appearing in the 1980s and gaining ground in the 1990s and 2000s, that scrutinizes the vital contributions of Jewish artists, writers, and critics of Viennese modernism. Stressing the differential, generational nature of Jewish patronage in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Elana Shapira’s important new monograph Style and Seduction: Jewish Patrons, Architecture, and Design in Fin de Siècle Vienna tackles the complex question of Jewish self-identification as expressed, both directly and indirectly, through art, architecture, and design. Even as Viennese Jews championed modernist art and design as a means of assimilation and acculturation, prominent Jewish patrons joined a predominantly Jewish rather than gentile community of collectors and connoisseurs, with their collecting practices highlighting rather than concealing their Jewishness. Such contemporary linkages between Viennese modernism and an ornamental gôut juif point to a revealing paradox in Jewish patronage. Antisemitic cartoonists and journalists likewise assailed Viennese Jews’ apparent enthusiasm for Secessionism, singling out especially the “Jewish painter” Gustav Klimt (a Catholic with close connections to moneyed Viennese Jewry), who wielded a proliferation of ornament and rich materials, so such cartoons alleged, to disguise his unattractive female portrait sitters. ![]() Not unlike the protagonist of Theodor Herzl’s Das neue Ghetto-a cultured, assimilated Jew who comes to terms with the pitfalls of acculturation and the Jews’ supposed emancipation-Loos believed that moneyed Viennese Jews were cordoning themselves off in a new, self-imposed aesthetic ghetto through their continued preference for ornamental, Secessionist interiors. Anti-Secessionist architect and cultural critic Adolf Loos agreed with Kraus, likening Secessionist design to a new caftan that failed to cloak the Jewish origins of its wearer/inhabitant. Yet Kraus believed that Secessionist design could not, metaphorically speaking, transform ghettos into mansions and was ultimately incapable of delivering the integration its patrons desired. 1 Just as gentile aristocrats kept a Hausjude (house Jew) prior to the era of Jewish emancipation, finde-siècle Jewish financiers and industrialists now kept a resident Secessionist decorator on hand to facilitate their aesthetic acculturation into mainstream gentile society. In an essay linking Secessionism to an ostentatious Jewish taste, Viennese journalist, satirist, and assimilated Jew Karl Kraus lambasted the proclivity of “money-proud Viennese Jewry” for commissioning elaborate Secessionist interiors to disguise their Jewishness through modernist art and design.
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