Main description:

This book takes a new, interdisciplinary approach to analyzing modern Viennese visual culture, one informed by Austro-German theater, contemporary medical treatises centered on hysteria, and an original examination of dramatic gestures in expressionist artworks. It centers on the following question: How and to what end was the human body discussed, portrayed, and utilized as an aesthetic metaphor in turn-of-the-century Vienna? By scrutinizing theatrically "hysterical" performances, avant-garde puppet plays, and images created by Oskar Kokoschka, Koloman Moser, Egon Schiele and others, Nathan J. Timpano discusses how Viennese artists favored the pathological or puppet-like body as their contribution to European modernism.

Contents:

List of Illustrations

List of Plates

Acknowledgments

Introduction: A Conundrum of the Viennese Modern Body

1 "The Semblance of Things": Re-Visioning Viennese Expressionism

2 "The Woman Emerges": Medical Vision and the Spectacle of Hysteria

3 Performing Hysteria: A Vogue for Hystero-Theatrical Gestures

4 A Tale of Three Hysterics: Elektra, Isolde, and Salome

5 The Inanimate Body Speaks: The Language of the Marionette Theater

6 Pathological Puppets: The Body and the Marionette in Viennese Expressionism