‘Complexities, conflicts, and cooperations in a shared cultural space’. Review of: The Museum Age in Austria-Hungary: Art and Empire in the Long Nineteenth Century, by Matthew Rampley, Markian Prokopovych, and Nóra Veszprémi,University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021, 290pp., 47 b. & w. illus., $99.95 hdbk, $39.95 pbk ISBN 9780271087108.

Abstract

The historiography of the fine arts museum in Europe is a narrative that has mostly followed the arc of the developing nation-state after the French Revolution. This approach has often focused on the emergence of the public museum as part of an ‘exhibitionary complex’ that helped to shape an ‘imagined community’ of patriotic citizens during the long nineteenth century. For the most part these nationally-based perspectives have been extremely productive, but they cannot do justice to many of the museums that emerged in the Austro-Hungarian Empire before its collapse. Indeed, the three authors of this excellent volume remind us that many of the ‘national’ fine arts museums of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire took shape well before the outbreak of war in 1914 and only took on their official status as representatives of their specific ‘nations’ in the years after 1918. Thus, the historiography of museums in central Europe needs a more nuanced approach. As the volume’s editor and contributor Matthew Rampley writes, ‘current state boundaries are not a meaningful framework for the study of museums in Habsburg Central Europe.’

This volume both suggests and models that new framework. To make their point the authors use several, more complicated (social, trans-national, and local) approaches to demonstrate how museums in the Empire’s important cities (Lemberg, Prague, Budapest, Cracow, and Zagreb) emerged from a complex set of Imperial, local and, as the century progressed, civic and nationalist ambitions. Together the authors unanimously argue in favor of viewing Austria-Hungary as a ‘shared cultural space’ with complex interactions that formed a web of relationships across the many nationalities of the Empire—a web that remains invisible to the post-1945 observer.

This invitation to complexity is both convincing and compelling and it opens a broad field of new research possibilities. Well-written and exquisitely researched, the volume also inadvertently highlights one of the greatest challenges to future scholars: fluency in the local languages. We are grateful to these authors to have given us this volume in English. Insofar as it models several museological approaches, it can be useful to any scholar who is interested in the historiography of museums in Europe’s long nineteenth century.