Books on women; the chancellor; and a Nobel Laureate

Abstract

In 2018 Austria celebrated the centennial of the end of an era: the downfall of the Habsburg Monarchy at the end of the First World War in 1918- and with it the end of Viennese Modernism. In the same year, four of the epoch’s protagonists died: Otto Wagner, Kolo Moser, Gustav Klimt, and Egon Schiele, all of whom have had a lasting impact on the architecture and art of Vienna. In keeping with the marketing logic of biographies, this jubilee year not only brought numerous biographically orientated exhibitions that ran under a common motto: “beauty and abyss.” The year also generated many new biographies of the stars of Modernism, including Gregor Mayer’s Ich Ewiges Kind: Das Leben des Egon Schiele, Renata Kassal-Mikula’s Otto Wagner 1841-1918: Sein Leben - Die Familie - Das Netzwerk - Line Chronik, and a new biography by Mona Horncastle and Alfred Weidinger of Gustav Klimt, the painter of The Woman in Gold.