Liberalism, Nationalism and Design Reform in the Habsburg Empire is a study of museums of design and applied arts in Austria-Hungary from 1864 to 1914. The Museum for Art and Industry (now the Museum of Applied Arts) as well as its design school occupies a prominent place in the study. The book also gives equal attention to museums of design and applied arts in cities elsewhere in the Empire, such as Budapest Prague, Cracow, Brno and Zagreb. The book is shaped by two broad concerns: the role of liberalism as a political, cultural and economic ideology motivating the museums' foundation, and their engagement with the politics of imperial, national and regional identity of the late Habsburg Empire. This book will be of interest for scholars of art history, museum studies, design history, and European history.

This important critical study of the history of public art museums in Austria-Hungary explores their place in the wider history of European museums and collecting, their role as public institutions, and their involvement in the complex cultural politics of the Habsburg Empire. Focusing on institutions in Vienna, Cracow, Prague, Zagreb, and Budapest, The Museum Age in Austria-Hungary traces the evolution of museum culture over the long nineteenth century, from the 1784 installation of imperial art collections in the Belvedere Palace (as a gallery open to the public) to the dissolution of Austria-Hungary after the First World War. Drawing on source materials from across the empire, the authors reveal how the rise of museums and display was connected to growing tensions between the efforts of Viennese authorities to promote a cosmopolitan and multinational social, political, and cultural identity, on the one hand, and, on the other, the rights of national groups and cultures to self-expression. They demonstrate the ways in which museum collecting policies, practices of display, and architecture engaged with these political agendas and how museums reflected and enabled shifting forms of civic identity, emerging forms of professional practice, the production of knowledge, and the changing composition of the public sphere. Original in its approach and sweeping in scope, this fascinating study of the museum age of Austria-Hungary will be welcomed by students and scholars interested in the cultural and art history of Central Europe.

When Austria annexed Galicia during the first partition of Poland in 1772, the province's capital Lemberg was a decaying Baroque town. By the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Lemberg had become a booming city with a modern, urban and, at the same time, distinctly Habsburg flavor. In the process of the ""long"" nineteenth century both Lemberg's appearance and the use of public space changed remarkably. The city center was transformed into a showcase of modernity and a site of conflicting symbolic representations, while other areas were left decrepit, overcrowded and neglected.""Habsburg Lemberg: Architecture, Public Space, and Politics in the Galician Capital, 1772-1914"" reveals that behind a variety of national, and positivist historical narratives of Lemberg - and of its architecture - there always existed a city that was labeled ""cosmopolitan"" yet ""provincial;"" and a Vienna, but still ""of the East."" Buildings, streets, parks and monuments became part and parcel of a complex set of culturally driven politics. The modern architecture influenced the portrayal of the Lemberg populace as much more sophisticated than they actually were.