Bavarian’: Art Into Design in Nineteenth Century Munich
Meaningful, entertaining, popular and ‘Bavarian’: art into design in nineteenth century Munich Stefan Muthesius Figure 1 15 March 1998 Introduction The long trajectory of this article is a set of designs which some Munich artists created during the second half of the nineteenth century and which carry the adjective Bavarian. By extension, the adjective is also used for all other artefacts found in the region, all those which are held to be authentic. To begin with, Bavarianism is a curious, and in some ways even a paradoxical phenomenon. To the Bavarians themselves it is abundantly clear what it entails. To the rest of the German tribes it constitutes a kind of other within their self, a special version of Germanness that is loved but not taken seriously. For all those outside Germany, the stereotype can be a confusing one: firstly, do ‘Bavarian’ and ‘Germanic’ not mean the same, personified, say, by the stolid beer-swilling Lederhosen-clad male? (Figure 1) Secondly, among other sights, ‘Bavaria’ also conjures up images of the Journal of Art Historiography Number 11 December 2014 Stefan Muthesius Meaningful, entertaining, popular and ‘Bavarian’: art into design in nineteenth century Munich Alps. Why and how, many would ask, should one make significant distinctions between an Austrian, a Tyrolese, or a Swiss Alpine culture, and add a separate Bavarian one to it? Yet none of these labelling problems worried the devoted early Munich protagonists who feature in this article, neither have they really troubled anybody else since then. Forming part of ‘Germany’, the stereotype of the province of Bavaria was, and is, a non-political one and to anyone from outside the region it belongs almost exclusively to the sphere of entertainment and tourism.
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