ABSTRACT
This chapter challenges the periodization of regional modernism in Central Europe at the turn of the twentieth century in an assessment of its functions in art historical discourses after 1918. Considering the emancipation of Salzburg as bastion of Austrian culture and of ‘Košice Modernism’ in Czechoslovakia, it argues that regional modernism remained vital in the construction of national and state identities after 1918 across the Habsburg successor states. Developing simultaneously to the modernism of the avant-garde that art historical accounts have long focused on, regional modernism, in this light, underlines myriad entanglements between the regional and the national, the peripheral and the central, as vital elements in the construction of art historical narratives throughout early twentieth-century Central Europe.
