Publication details
The Birth of Painting from the Spirit of the Gingerbread : Folk Art and Regionalism in the Reception of Anna Lesznai’s Work in Interwar Vienna
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| Year of publication | 2019 |
| Type | Conference abstract |
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| Description | Born and raised as the daughter of an ennobled Hungarian-Jewish family in Körtvélyes, Anna Lesznai has come to be seen as one of the core female members of the Hungarian pre-war avant-garde. Despite her manifold activities in the interwar years, the reception of Lesznai’s work is thus closely tied to the pre-war era, when she was closely involved with central agents of Hungarian modernism. By tracing how it was received and discussed in interwar Vienna, my paper aims to re-establish Lesznai’s presence in interwar culture, moving beyond categorisations of her as a “pre-war” modernist whose story after the collapse of the Habsburg Empire is read as a kind of post-script. Moreover, it ties the discussion of Lesznai into a broader consideration of the ways in which folk art continued to affect interwar culture in relation to the paradigm of folk art and regionalism as national representation. Given the orientation towards regionalism that represented a dominant strand of Austrian art between the wars, my paper assesses how Lesznai’s work fits into contemporary discussions about regional art. While, in the Austrian context, these trends have dominantly been associated with völkish tendencies, the situation was in fact not as straightforward and included much more variety. In terms of urban romanticism for the countryside, there was little difference whether these perceptions were presented by a migrant woman like Lesznai or a “‘local”’ man such as Alfons Walde or Albin Egger-Lienz. However, the reception of Lesznai’s work was distinctly tied to her femininity, in contrast with works by Austrian artists, which were connoted within masculine terms. If we consider the manner in which “her” regionalism was presented to a Viennese audience in comparison to that of local artists, Lesznai’s images of the countryside gain a particular function: in the context of the renewal of modern art through regionalism and folk art influences, the stylisation of Lesznai and her work as feminine, exotic, Slavic / Hungarian, soft and naive represented an image of the other that complemented the rise of a home-grown regionalism within the Viennese cultural scene. |
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