Die Macht der Kunstkritik: Ludwig Hevesi und die Wiener Moderne by Ilona Sármány-Parsons (review)

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• Die Macht der Kunstkritik: Ludwig Hevesi und die Wiener Moderne by Ilona Sármány-Parsons
• Patrick Werkner

Ilona Sármány-Parsons, Die Macht der Kunstkritik: Ludwig Hevesi und die Wiener Moderne. Vienna: Böhlau, 2022. 488 pp.

Ilona Sármány-Parsons is a Hungarian-born art historian who taught for many years at the Central European University in Prague and Budapest. She published extensively on the fine arts in Central Europe, especially on nineteenth-and twentieth-century art, including a book on Gustav Klimt, which has been translated into five languages. Now her opus magnum has appeared, originally published in Hungarian and then recently in a (very good) German translation. The work represents the fruits of a lifelong preoccupation with Ludwig Hevesi (1843–1910), who might be described as the “critical Pope” of Viennese Jugendstil. Die Macht der Kunstkritik: Ludwig Hevesi und die Wiener Moderne runs to almost five hundred pages and has more than three hundred illustrations. The book is much more than an eulogy to Hevesi, who has gone down in history as an insightful critic of the pioneering [End Page 116] exhibitions of Vienna’s Secession. Hevesi devised the motto inscribed over the portal of the Secession Building, with which every devotee of turn-of-the-century Vienna is familiar: “To the age its art. To art its freedom.”

Based on a detailed reading of Hevesi’s exhibition reviews and commentary on the contemporary art scene, Sármány-Parsons unfolds a panorama of cultural developments from 1867 to 1909. The European art criticism of the day is the background against which the author highlights the burgeoning art of the fin-de-siècle: first in Budapest, then moving the focus to the crucible of Viennese Modernism. The author adopts a cultural-historical perspective on events in the tradition of Carl Schorske, an approach that is highly appropriate to the feuilleton genre written for the educated public in which Hevesi so excelled. His exhibition critiques dazzle, providing the best introduction for anyone interested in the Wiener Moderne. Hevesi’s writings and interpretations about Klimt’s ceiling paintings for the Vienna University (destroyed during World War II) represent even today a most inspiring analysis of these central works of Symbolism, notwithstanding the avalanche of commentary that has subsequently been published.

The author, however, departs from the usual chorus of panegyrics. She gives plenty of space to the decidedly unfazed conservative art criticism in marked contrast to the more “heroic” narrative of the Wiener Moderne. That victory lap was reflected in the creation of new institutions such as the Wiener Secession and the Kunstgewerbeschule, both of which were backed by a sympathetic cultural bureaucracy. This approach of the author is also reflected in the choice of illustrations. The selection is dominated neither by the wild formal experiments of vegetative Jugendstil that feature in the work of Kolo Moser nor the geometric designs favored by Joseph Hoffmann (one of which is featured on the cover of Hevesi’s seminal book “Acht Jahre Sezession,” 1906). Such are peripheral to the present study, which excludes the large field of applied art in order to concentrate on painting. The selection of illustrations is dominated instead by numerous works of Realism, Naturalism, and Historicism—all absolutely “contemporary” at the time that Hevesi wrote about them. The book’s cover features a watercolor by Rudolf von Alt from 1872—appropriately so, given Hevesi’s admiration for this painter, on whose monograph he worked up to the end of his life.

Hevesi, who hitherto has been principally associated with Modernism, is here differently positioned, as an art journalist who wrote with zest and engagement for his public on the complex scene of art development in the last [End Page 117] third of the nineteenth century. He did so never with a desire to shock or provoke, but with an overriding empathy for the creative artist and a mission to explain his or her work to the wider public. With his left hand, as it were, he also wrote theater criticism and book reviews as well as some literary works of his own (recently discussed by Endre Hárs in a book...