Seminar Series: Elana Shapira

"My lecture explores the interconnected networks of Austrian artists and German patrons in early twentieth-century Berlin. Focusing on the work of the expressionist artist Oskar Kokoschka and the illustrator and graphic designer Julius Klinger during their stay in Berlin around 1910, I examine how the fertile modernist relationship between art and media played a crucial role in advancing their careers.

In the years between 1900 and 1933, artists who came to the city for varying lengths of time, often together with other Viennese and Central European migrants, but also independently, reworked the creative ideas they brought with them to contribute to the cultures of modernity in the German capital. How did the two protagonists, Kokoschka and Klinger, transform their self-image as "outsiders" into a sought-after artistic language? In my paper, I propose to consider how various other (self-) identifications (ethnic and sexual) shaped their art and the role of networks in maintaining a belief in their artistic charisma. The conclusion briefly considers the extent to which a Viennese School developed in Berlin as a result of a series of cultural transfers between the two cities over this three-decade period."

Elana Shapira is a cultural and art historian and lecturer at the Cultural Studies department at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. She has organised and co-organised international symposiums and workshops on the topics of Austrian émigrés in the United States and in Britain, Viennese modernism, Jews and cultural identity in Central European modernism, and women artists, designers, architects, and patrons. Her recent publications include the co-edited anthologies "Émigré Cultures in Design and Architecture" (2017), "Freud and the Émigré" (2020), and "Gestalterinnen: Women, Design and Society in Interwar Vienna" (2023), as well as the edited anthologies "Design Dialogue: Jews, Culture andViennese Modernism" (2018) and "Designing Transformation: Jews and Cultural Identity in Central European Modernism" (2021). Her forthcoming books are the edited volume "Austrian Identity and Modernity: Culture and Politics in the 20th Century" (2025) and co-edited biography "Ella Briggs: The Life and Work of an Unconventional Architect" (2025).