Unteres Belvedere, 11 October 2014 – 1 February 2015

Text: György Szegő

Joseph Urban: Zedlitzhalle, Vienna – exhibition venue of Hagenbund, 1901

Active in Vienna between 1900 and 1938, a group of artists managed to stand well above daily politics. Its members were not only from Austria: many Hungarian, Czech, Slovenian and Polish artists kept in touch with each other after the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. It was not only the rivalry of various styles, but also friendships and joint exhibitions that orchestrated and kept them together up until the Anschluss – from that time on the very concept of Central Europe was persecuted and thus the network of artists inevitably broke up. The current exhibition presents events associated with the results of the research work done since the 1990s. Researchers now focus on examining how human interrelations influence the evolution of arts as such. During the four decades of its existence, Wiener Hagenbund has organized a total of 250 exhibitions of which 141 have been processed so far. Visitors and the readers of the studies eroding canons may once again ponder about how ideologies/dictatorial systems could appear in the diaspore of Modern art in the 20th century which had been originally versatile and how the ideology clad the artists search for novelties into the attires of its own purposes.