Re-dressing the nation : Allotria’s 1876 Festzug Karl V and late nineteenth century Munich art practices
Creators: name: Wieber, Sabine
Publisher: name: University of British Columbia
Year: 2009

description: The time span between Germany's unification in 1871 and the onset of World War I in 1914 provided a very fertile ground for both avant-garde and state-supported modes of artistic production. Yet, while the new Reich was perceived by the outside as having brought unity to Germany's formerly fractured agglomeration of individual states, the nation was actually marked by internal rifts, tensions and competing aspirations. Munich was an important center for art and culture during this period. By the 1870's its well known Royal Academy attracted a large body of international students, including a considerable number from North America. Munich was also renown as an art center at this time as it was the nexus for numerous artist groups organized under both national and regional auspices. Allotria, formed in 1873, was the local artist society which, due to the prominence of many of its members as academic professors, was recognized as Munich's pre-eminent group. This institutional body provided a social space that encouraged an informal but important intersection of artists and "friends of the arts." In other words, the promotion of a common social life between sectors of the upper echelons of Munich society and academic and independent artists was one of Allotria's key objectives. Allotria's 1876 artist festival the Feslzug Karl V became a highly visible event that was viewed as central to Munich's artistic pre-eminence in numerous newspaper and journal accounts of the time. This study will address the ways in which this particular festival could be read on one level as signifying a specific national identity by evoking a period of unity through reference to Charles V and the Holy Roman Empire. I will also explore how a northern Renaissance visual vocabulary carefully manipulated in the festival and in the different representations that circulated before and after its staging, could be interpreted as working to contest these very notions. It is thus, tensions and discontinuities within the festival's seemingly homogenizing references and visual vocabulary that this study is interested in tracing out. How could Munich's artists and upper classes represent themselves as heirs to a particular Germanic tradition and therefore, as supporters of the new nation while also laying claim to their threatened position of cultural superiority with the new Reich? What import did the northern Renaissance idiom have at this specific socio-political juncture and how did various rhetorical strategies specific to different modes of representation functioning within this cultural practice and its re-presentations serve to rationalize particular kinds of regional patronage systems and artistic practices by Allodia's academic and independent artists? Ultimately, I will argue that the festival's re-enacting of an historic event that took place during Germany's last experience of unity as an European power, was neither a nostalgic turning to the past nor simply a means to establish a genealogy that linked Munich's citizens to what was now a celebrated moment in the context of a only recently formed German nation. Rather, I will examine how the artist festival of the Festzug Karl V served to facilitate active reworkings of this past that accommodated particular forms of self representation crucial to new market relations, to systems of patronage within Munich's modern middle class culture and to a new status of the artist assertively promoted by Allotria.