Julia Secklehner – Marta Fililpová – Matthew Rampley

Thursday, May 8, 2025: Julia Secklehner, Rethinking Modern Austrian Art Beyond the Metropolis
Book Presentation & Lecture, followed by a conversation between the Julia Secklehner, Stefanie Kitzberger and Eva Klimpel

Drawing upon her monograph Rethinking Modern Austrian Art Beyond the Metropolis (Routledge, 2025), Julia Secklehner explores the role of regional cultures in modern art and visual culture in Central Europe from 1918 to 1938. By introducing paintings, photographs, and illustrated magazines in relation to themes such as tourism, social activism, and rural exoticism, it offers a fresh perspective on Central European art and visual culture. It particularly highlights Austria, a country often neglected in broader histories of modernism in Central Europe after 1918, where the countryside gained considerable visibility as part of modern culture between the wars. Examples from Czechoslovakia and Hungary also play a crucial comparative role and challenge the fragmented national histories of modernism in the region. Overall, Rethinking Modern Austrian Art Beyond the Metropolis questions the assumption that modern art and visual culture were solely at home in urban spaces and argues that it is vital to consider the countryside's role as an agent of renewal and emancipation to construct more nuanced histories of modernism.

Dr. Julia Secklehner is an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellow at Constructor University in Bremen (2024–25), where she researches networks of modernist women photographers in Central Europe. She is otherwise based at Masaryk University in Brno, working as a postdoctoral researcher on the project “Beyond the Village: Folk Cultures as Agents of Modernity, 1918–1945,” which is funded by the Czech National Grant Agency. Julia completed her PhD in Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2018. Her monograph, Rethinking Modern Austrian Art Beyond the Metropolis (Routledge, 2025), received the Masaryk University Scientist Award in 2024.

Thursday, May 15, 2025: Marta Filipová, A fine line: lace between folk art and modern design

Where does folk art end and design begin? Who is the author of the textiles designed by trained artists and made by anonymous hands in local workshops? The lands of Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia (Upper Hungary before 1918) were historically rich with needlework courses and workshops that provided local women with an important source of income. Organised from Vienna before the end of WWI, lace and embroidery production came under the Czechoslovak administration and continued to supply mainly urban and international clientele. The talk focuses on Emilie Paličková Mildeová (1892-1973), a prominent Czech lace designer who transformed lace into a modern medium. Her creations were successfully exhibited internationally and advertised alongside more traditional and fully anonymous needlework. The work of Paličková Mildeová therefore invites questions about the narrow margin that divides folk art of regions north of Vienna from design and fine art. It also provides the opportunity to discuss the purposes for which the different types of lace were created both in Czechoslovakia and outside as well as the very definition of folk art.

Dr. Marta Filipová is Research Fellow at the Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, where she is the Principal Investigator of the project Beyond the Village: Folk Cultures as Agents of Modernity, 1918-1945. She has been working on the questions of identities in modern art and design and the politics of display. Her latest publication is Czechoslovakia at the World’s Fairs. Behind the Façade (CEU Press, 2024), she also published Modernity, History and Politics in Czech Art (Routledge, 2020) and edited the volume Cultures of International Exhibitions 1840-1940. Great Exhibitions in the Margins (Ashgate, 2015). She is a member of the editorial board of the journal Art East/Central.

Wednesday, June 4, 2025: Matthew Rampley, States of Exception: Collecting Asian Art and National Identity in Central Europe

In my notes I have tried to be impartial. Even though I am white and proud of the capacities and pre-eminence of my race, I have lived enough – for more than 15 years – amongst people of different colour who have other ways of thinking to have got rid of many prejudices. (Enrique Stanko Vráz)

With these words, the Czech traveller Enrique Stanko Vráz (1860-1932) introduced the book China (1904), an account of his travels across east Asia. Vráz was one of many individuals from the Czech lands who travelled across the globe at the turn of the century, visiting distant lands, and who collected works of art and artefacts, and then deposited them with museums in Prague and elsewhere. They ensured that museums in the current Czech Republic have rich collections of ceramics, textiles, and metalwork from China, India and the Islamic world. Their donations are much celebrated. In recent years, and in the light of debates over the restitution of museum collections, their activities have come under growing scrutiny. However, what is of increasing interest, too, is how their collecting, as one of the primary ways in which Czechs came into contact with non-European peoples, helped define a sense of national identity. Czechs imagined themselves to be different from the colonizing powers of Belgium, Britain or France, for example, and the sentiments of figures such as Vráz could be marshalled as evidence of a different kind of sensibility. This notion of ‘exceptionalism’ was not unique to the Czechs. Austrians, for example, liked to contrast themselves with the supposed rapacious Germans. This talk is thus concerned with how the encounter with non-European peoples, engaging with their art and culture, informed notions of national identity in the early 20th century. It also asks, however, how much credibility these claims had. Were Czechs, Austrians and other central Europeans really so different?

Prof. Matthew Rampley is an art historian at the Department of Art History at Masaryk University in Brno. He received his PhD in Aesthetics and History of Art from the University of St Andrews in 1993, following undergraduate studies in Classics and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford. His academic career has included positions at the Surrey Institute of Art and Design, Edinburgh College of Art, and Teesside University, where he served as Assistant Dean. From 2010 to 2019, he held the Chair in History of Art at the University of Birmingham, where he also served as Head of Department and later as Head of School. Since 2019, he has been Principal Investigator of an ERC-funded project on art and architecture in interwar Central Europe.

His teaching and research focus on Central European art and architecture of the 19th and 20th centuries, art historiography, aesthetics, and modern and contemporary art. Among his major research projects are an ERC Advanced Grant (2018–2023), a large grant from the Leverhulme Trust (2015–2018), and the prestigious MUNI Award (2019–2023), supported with CZK 25 million.

He is the author of numerous publications, including The Vienna School of Art History (2013), The Seductions of Darwin (2017), and Liberalism, Nationalism and Design Reform in the Habsburg Empire (2020), as well as editor of Art History and Visual Studies in Europe. His scholarly work has appeared in leading journals such as the Oxford Art Journal.