| During the late nineteenth century, domestic interior decoration first emerged as a central concern of architecture and applied arts discourse. Proclaiming the interior's capacity to mold middle-class life, the era's critics and artists set the stage for the twentieth-century view of the house as a tool for social engineering. Jakob von Falke (1825-1897), a leading, yet little-studied, museum curator, cultural historian, and popular writer on the applied arts, contributed as much as any individual to establishing the terms of this nascent discourse. He wrote one of the era's most widely read treatises on decoration, Die Kunst im Hause [Art in the House] (1871), and played a central role in shaping domestic material culture in Vienna during the city's epochal transformation of the 1860s and 1870s.;This dissertation examines several episodes in Falke's long and prolific career. Chapter 1 addresses his research in the 1850s into the history of clothing and fashion. Drawing on the emerging discipline of Kulturgeschichte (cultural history), an early branch of the social sciences, Falke developed a theory of the relationship of material forms to social conditions. Chapter 2 looks at how he used Kulturgeschichte to formulate a program for the interior based on historical analysis, but also how he attempted to find an alternative to a historically based approach to design. Jacob Burckhardt's notion of sixteenth-century Italy as the cultural ideal for the present inspired Falke to argue for a Renaissance revival style. However, he simultaneously questioned historicism and called for decoration based purely on color and ornament as tools for shaping emotional experience. Chapter 3 considers Falke's activities at the 1873 Vienna World Exhibition, where he promoted Eastern European peasant crafts as models of pure form and color for Austrian industrial artists. This work was part of a wider discourse on Eastern European folk crafts that had implications for Hapsburg nationalist politics. It also played an important role in the next generation's fascination with folk art as an antidote to a perceived crisis of modernity. Chapter 4 links Falke's theory to the Viennese painter Hans Makart, who developed a style of decoration in the 1870s that exerted a tremendous, yet rarely recognized, influence on European homes over the remainder of the century. Makart's style, referred to by contemporaries as malerisch (painterly), was rooted in historicism, but like Falke's theory, moved toward eclecticism, fantasy and psychological inwardness, ultimately inspiring the Jugendstil and Secession movements at the turn of the century. |
