The Salon
By Vienna to the world
The SalonNov 07, 2023
The Salon Episode 17
In this episode of the Salon, author John Kropf dishes on his new book (The Color Capital of the World) with Megan Brandow-Faller, sharing his personal memories of the American Crayon Company and the company’s fortunes intersected with new discourses on child creativity.
The Salon_Episode 12
Laura Morowitz and Megan Brandow-Faller (co-editors of Erasures and Eradications in Modern Viennese Art, Architecture and Design) sit down to discuss Morowitz’s latest book, Art, Exhibition and Erasure, which examines three exhibitions of fine art held at the Vienna Künstlerhaus during the period of National Socialist rule and shows how each attempted to culturally erase elements anathema to Nazi ideology: the City, the Jewess and fin-de-siècle Vienna. Morowitz weighs in on the American implications of her project and its importance for the American museum-going public today.
the Salon_Episode 11
Professor Ellen Winner (Boston College, Emerita) chats with Megan Brandow-Faller on her new Oxford University Press monograph, An Uneasy Guest in the Schoolhouse, which charts the vast pendulum swings surrounding art education, from its 19th century roots as a handmaiden to industry, to an emphasis on cultivating ‘the whole child’ among early 20th C progressive educators, and, ironically, towards recamped mid-20th c utilitarian justifications tethering arts education to supposedly improved test scores and grades. Brandow-Faller and Winner dwell on progressive art educators like Cizek, Dewey and Lowenfeld, and the continued relevance of arts education for today’s democratic, inclusive present.
The Salon_Episode 10
In this episode, art historian Ladislav Jackson (Brno Technical University) sits down with Julia Secklehner (Masaryk University) to chat about the life and work of the architect Liane Zimbler (1892-1987) and her two careers in Central Europe and California. Jackson explains how he came across Zimbler by chance, opening new pathways in his research on women architects, transgenerational design and upcycling.
The Salon_Episode 9
In this episode, art historian Michael Yonan (UC Davis) sits down with frolleague Megan Brandow-Faller (CUNY Kingsborough) to dish on the material turn, the Vienna School and his newest book project, offering advice to a new generation of scholars on the continued importance of in person encounters with objects in a digital age. The two discuss their mutual affinity for understudied genres, movements and media, as well as all things Austria.
The Salon_Episode 8
In this episode Michelle Jackson-Beckett (Columbia University) chats with Julia Secklehner about transatlantic transfers in design in the work of architects such as Ernst Lichtblau (1883-1963). She also introduces some of the debates surrounding both rejections and revisions of modernist ideals in exhibitions of Viennese interior design and housing between 1918 and 1938, which are the focus of her forthcoming monograph with Oxford University Press.
The Salon_Episode 7
In this episode, Elizabeth Otto (University of Buffalo) chats to Julia Secklehner about her latest research on art therapy in Europe and the United States with a special focus on the social realist painter and art therapist Edith Kramer (1916-2014).
The Salon_Episode 4
In this episode, filmmaker and scriptwriter Elena Goatelli talks about her film „Looking for Erika“, an „artistic thriller“ documentary about the artist Erika Giovanna Klien (1900–1957), who started her career in Vienna before moving to the United States in 1929. Find the trailer to the film here. Elena Goatelli will be part of the roundtable discussion on 12 April 2023.
The Salon Episode 3
The Salon_Episode 2
In this episode, Megan Brandow-Faller talks to Dr Elana Shapira, who will be giving a keynote lecture for the “Creativity from Vienna to the World” event series on Thursday, 2 March 2023, about orientalism in the work of ceramicist Vally Wieselthier.
The Salon_Episode 16_part 2
Pat Kirkham, Professor of Design History at Kingston University, UK, shares her memories of the Hungarian-born, American designer Eva Striker Zeisel (1906–2011). The two-part interview draws both on her expertise as a design historian and her close personal contact with Zeisel and her daughter over a number of years.
The Salon_Episode 16_part1
Pat Kirkham, Professor of Design History at Kingston University, UK, shares her memories of the Hungarian-born, American designer Eva Striker Zeisel (1906–2011). The two-part interview draws both on her expertise as a design historian and her close personal contact with Zeisel and her daughter over a number of years.
The Salone_Episode 15
Megan Brandow-Faller and Julia Secklehner sit down to chat about Megan’s current book project, Child Creativity and the Visual Arts: From Secessionist Vienna to Postwar America (forthcoming with Bloomsbury Academic), which focuses on the cult of child creativity in post-war America and its intellectual roots in Secessionist Vienna.
The Salon_Epizode 14
In this episode, Kirsten Krick-Aigner (Wofford College) speaks to Julia Secklehner about her research on three extraordinary women artists – Lisel Salzer (1906–2005), Lisl Weil (1910–2006) and Bettina Bauer-Ehrlich (1903–1985) – women’s social bonds, and intertwined careers across two continents.
The Salon-Episode 13
Jonathan Kaplan-Wajselbaum ( University of Technology Sydney, Australia, and Sydney Jewish Museum) and Julia Secklehner sit down to talk about his book Jews in Suits. Men's Dress in Vienna, 1890-1938 (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023), which proposes a new way of reading men and clothing cultures within an iconic cultural milieu, offering insights into the relationship of clothing and grooming to the understanding of the self.
Check out the flyer here for a 35% discount code on the book!
The Salon_Episode 6
In this episode, Megan Brandow-Faller (CUNY) chats with Frances Tanzer (Clark University) on the promotion of Egon Schiele by Austro-American emigres like Otto Kallir and Kallir’s broader attempts to recover a liberal version of Austria untainted by National Socialism. Also covered is Tanzer’s forthcoming book (Univ Pennsylvanis Press) entitled “Vanishing Vienna: Jewish Absence in Postwar Central Europe,” which analyzes the fraught attempts to restore the cultural dynamism of pre-Nazi Vienna as Austrians and Jews reimagined themselves and Central European culture after the Holocaust.
The Salon_Episode 5
Joseph Koerner (Harvard) sits down with Megan Brandow-Faller (CUNY) to discuss the cultural memory of Secessionist Vienna, history, art history and (auto)biography. Their conversation covers Prof Koerner’s award-winning documentary The Burning Child (now available on amazon prime), which interweaves his own family’s story with that of the modernist movement itself; Prof Koerner’s childhood in Vienna and Pittsburgh; and the recent rediscovery of the particularly Jewish character of Vienna 1900.
The Salon_Episode 1
In the first episode of the podcast ‘The Salon’, Megan Brandow-Faller and Julia Secklehner discuss the main ideas for ‘Creativity from Vienna to the World’ and introduce some of the women designers that the project puts in focus.