Vienna took its interiors seriously. Between 1898 and 1938, many of this city’s greatest minds grappled with how to structure and appoint the inner spaces of everyday life. The result—the modern home—would possess an interior that (according to its creators) fitted another, more impenetrable interior: the subjective inwardness of the home’s inhabitants. Built architecture and psychic sphere, the Viennese interior was a contested matrix of human values. The novelist Hermann Broch portrayed fin-de siècle Vienna as a 'value vacuum'. These lectures explore Viennese homemaking as attempts to fill that vacuum. Lecture One, titled 'The Kiss' and focused on the 1902 Beethoven exhibition held in the Secession building, pays special attention to the innovative use of plaster in a new 'art of space' —what Viennese artists and designers termed Raumkunst. Lecture Two, 'The Burning Child', considers Sigmund Freud’s apartment and offices at Berggasse 19, the house Ludwig Wittgenstein designed for his sister Hermine, Adolf Loos’s early residential projects, and the design reforms of Josef Frank and Otto Neurath. The relevance of these utopian interiors today—it will be argued—rests on the condition of Vienna as an unhomely home. Already before the ruptures of 1918 and 1938 buried its imagined future, this European capital city had been the rehearsal space for exile. The Viennese interior thus continues poignantly to ask: what is home?

Joseph Leo Koerner

Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and raised there and in Vienna, Joseph Leo Koerner studied at Yale University (B.A. 1980), Cambridge University (M.A. 1982), University of Heidelberg (1982-3), and University of California at Berkeley (M.A. 1985, Ph.D. 1988). After three years at the Society of Fellows, Harvard University (1986-9), he joined the Harvard faculty, where he was Professor of History of Art and Architecture until 1999. 1999-2000 he was Professor of Modern Art History at the University of Frankfurt; in 2000 he moved to London, where he was Professor first at University College London (until 2004), then at the Courtauld Institute of Art (until 2007). Koerner organized teaching exhibitions at Harvard on Early Netherlandish Painting (1990), German Renaissance Art (1993), Pieter Bruegel (1995) and Netherlandish prints 1550-1675 (1999). At the Austrian National Gallery in 1997, he curated a retrospective of the work of his father, the painter Henry Koerner. In 2002, he collaborated with Bruno Latour and others on the exhibition Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars at the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe. His books include Die Suche nach dem Labyrinth—Der Mythos von Daedalus und Ikarus (1983), Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape (1990), The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (1993), and The Reformation of the Image (2004). Koerner wrote and presented the three-part series Northern Renaissance for BBC Television, as well as the feature-length documentary Vienna: City of Dreams, premiered on the BBC in December 2007. Koerner was awarded the Jan Mitchell Prize for the History of Art in 1992. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (since 1995) and the American Philosophical Society (since 2008) and a Senior Fellow (since 2008) at Harvard's Society of Fellows. He received the 2009 Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award, which will fund projects during the years 2010-2014. Koerner is currently Thomas Professor of the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University.

Respondents

Dr Steven Beller Steven Beller was born in London, England in 1958, of American and Austrian parents. He was educated at Cambridge University, where he was a research fellow, 1985-89. From 1989 he has lived in the USA. He has written widely on Austrian, Jewish and Central European history. His books include Vienna and the Jews, 1867-1938: A Cultural History (Cambridge University Press, 1989); Herzl (Halban, 1991); Francis Joseph (Longman, 1996); and A Concise History of Austria (Cambridge, 2006). He also edited and introduced the anthology Rethinking Vienna 1900 (Berghahn, 2001). His latest book is Antisemitism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2008). He is currently an independent scholar resident in Washington DC. His current projects include an introductory book on democracy, and a book on musicals and the ideology of showbusiness.

Dr Irena Murray Dr Irena Murray was born in Prague and moved to Canada in 1968. She became Chief Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections Division and the John Bland Canadian Architecture Collection at McGill University in September 1996. She has been based at McGill University since 1973, first as Reference and Instructional Services Librarian at the McLennan Library, followed by a post as Head of the Blackader-Lauterman Library of Architecture and Art, and Curator of the Canadian Architecture Collection. Prior to her role at McGill Dr Murray also worked for the National Library of Canada as well as the National Archives. Dr Murray has pursued advanced research in architectural history (Ph.D in Architectural History and Theory from McGill University), serving as curator of exhibitions and publishing on a wide variety of subjects. Her particular expertise is in Modernism and the architecture of Central Europe. She has also taught courses in research methodology and art and architecture librarianship. Dr Murray has served as a consultant to Canadian and American libraries, museums and government departments.

Professor Peter Pulzer Peter Pulzer was educated at the Universities of Cambridge and London, UK. From 1957 to 1996 he taught Politics and Modern History at the University of Oxford. From 1984 until his retirement he was Gladstone Professor of Government and Fellow of All Souls College. He has held numerous visiting professorships at North American and European universities. His research interests cover modern European history, including Jewish history, and extremist political movements. His books include The Rise of Political Antisemitism in Germany and Austria (German translation 2004), Jews and the German State (2003) and Germany 1870-1945: Politics, State-Building and War (1997).