Abstract
Jindřich Vybiral Leopold Bauer: Haretiker der modernen Architektur, 1872–1938 Basel: Birkhauser, 2018, 580 pp., 348 color and 253 b/w illus. $91.99 (cloth), ISBN 9783036516309 When Otto Wagner decided to retire from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna at the end of the 1911–12 academic year, he recommended his former student Jože Plecnik as his successor. Had Wagner opted to step down only a few years before, he likely would have put forward either Joseph Maria Olbrich or Josef Hoffmann to take over his special architecture master class. But Olbrich died of leukemia in 1908 and Hoffmann went his own way, founding the Wiener Werkstatte with Koloman Moser. Wagner held all three men in the highest regard. He inscribed their names on the facade of his final project, the Artists' Court of 1918, along with those of his early heroes and role models, Eduard van der Null, August Sicard von Sicardsburg, and Karl Friedrich Schinkel.1 Wagner's fellow professors at the academy voted unanimously to approve his recommendation. The officials at the Ministry of Education, however, rejected the request and postponed Wagner's retirement for a year. When the professors at the academy again put Plecnik's name forward, the ministry officials once more turned it down. The professors held fast to their decision, but the officials demanded an alternative. Thus, pressed to find a solution, the professors proposed two possible replacements, submitting the name of Leopold Bauer, another former Wagner student, along with that of Plecnik. Bauer, very much against Wagner's wishes, received the appointment. It was a disastrous decision. The story, which Jindřich Vybiral relates in detail in his excellent new monograph on Bauer, marked, in his words, one of the most significant “‘cases’ in the history of Viennese modernism” (323).2 The “not entirely hidden background” of the controversy, he explains, involved not only questions concerning the direction of modern architecture in the Habsburg lands but also the ever-present politics of nationalism and …
Published Version
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