The Celebrity Monarch: Empress Elisabeth and the Modern Female Portrait by Olivia Gruber Florek (review)

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• The Celebrity Monarch: Empress Elisabeth and the Modern Female Portrait by Olivia Gruber Florek
• Hansjakob Werlen

Olivia Gruber Florek, The Celebrity Monarch: Empress Elisabeth and the Modern Female Portrait. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2023. 248 pp.

In posthumous fame and adulation, no monarchical figure can compete with Empress Elisabeth of Austria. The enduring worldwide fascination with the beautiful Bavarian duchess that began with Ernst Marischka’s 1950s trilogy of Sissi films has only increased since, as various media forms (musical, concert, TV/streaming program, tabloid serial) craft new variations of the empress’s persona for an eager public. Extricating Elisabeth from the carapace of innumerable mythologizing, commercializing, and kitschifying representations is one of the many achievements of Olivia Gruber Florek’s thoroughly researched study, The Celebrity Monarch.

As the title indicates, the study demonstrates how Empress Elisabeth transformed the iconographic traditions of royal portraiture into representations of evolving celebrity culture and, through her interventions in and contributions to the creative process of her portraiture, established a visual style that exerted its influence on modern paintings of female portraits.

While Elisabeth’s reclusiveness and her controversial eschewal of representational duties are well known, The Celebrity Monarch shows a woman who, although constrained by imperial etiquette, deliberately subverted courtly norms of representation to fashion a novel image: the celebrity monarch. Gruber Florek, in her analysis of the famous Franz Xaver Winterhalter paintings, demonstrates Elisabeth’s creative contributions to the startling changes of monarchical representation and the role of the rapidly evolving medium of photography in this transformation. [End Page 127]

The book is first and foremost an art-historical study, but its findings extend to many other histories, among them of the late Habsburg empire, of psychiatry, of photography, and of emerging celebrity culture. Key works in these fields as well as references to important theorists provide scaffolding for the study’s central contentions. This expansive approach, well documented in the lengthy final bibliography, allows Gruber Florek to engage Winterhalter’s paintings of Elisabeth in a dialogue that not only considers their novel and subversive iconography but also interprets their visual features for messages relevant both to the personality of the empress and the sociopolitical, artistic, and historical developments of Habsburg Austria in the second part of the nineteenth century.

The title of Chapter 1, “Staging the State Portrait,” points to the dual nature of imperial portraiture: the presentation of an individual meant to disappear behind courtly roles. As Gruber Florek shows, the Winterhalter portraits of 1864–65 markedly deviate from official portraiture in their novel iconographic presentation of the empress. This remarkable change was the result of a collaborative undertaking between the painter and Elisabeth: using her extensive collection of cartes de visite photographs, a collection that included photographs of famous actresses and dancers, Elisabeth favored a representational strategy that broke with aristocratic rules and, in its explicit use of theatrical gestures, connected her portrait to images of contemporary celebrities. By actively shaping the creation of her representation and subverting the conventions of traditional aristocratic portraiture, Elisabeth, Gruber Florek contends, inaugurated a visual style whose influence would extend to twentieth-century female portraiture. While Elisabeth’s poses were reminiscent of famous actresses, like the Vienna sensation Charlotte Wolter, the enacted roles were not without political intent, as when Elisabeth mimed the role of Queen of Hungary in photographs several months before the coronation.

In Chapter 2, “Styling Authenticity: The Boundless Hair of the Celebrity Monarch,” the study investigates the iconographic choices that made Elisabeth an authentic, “natural,” and charismatic presence. As the chapter title already makes clear, Elisabeth’s famously bountiful hair played an important role in demonstrating authenticity and “naturalness,” essential qualities already aspired to by the early eighteenth-century French actress Adrienne Lecouvreur and later imitated by Sarah Bernhard. Gruber Florek sees the [End Page 128] combination of minacious beauty and self-assured presence found in later photographs of Bernhard already prefigured in the portraits and photographs of Elisabeth, a female authority considered a threat in late nineteenth-century images of the femme fatale. This connection to fin-de-siècle painting is more fully explored in a later chapter.

Chapter 3, titled “The Imaginary Empress...