ABSTRACT
The impact of rural spaces on modern art in interwar Central Europe has hardly been explored. This is particularly true for Austria, where a focus on Vienna has long obscured the rich cultural production in and about the countries' rural provinces. Building on concepts of rural and regional modernism, this introduction argues that rural modernism held a significant stake in identity-building and processes of artistic renewal in the 1920s and 1930s and shows that this was especially pertinent to post-imperial Austria. In light of diverging understandings of the city-countryside dynamic, it maps a fascination with this relationship, which was far from stable and continued to be renegotiated in the altered geopolitical set-up of the region after 1918. Taking this as a point of departure, the chapter argues that the countryside not only represented as an ideal but was also an active cultural agent. Its assessment allows a more inclusive view on Austrian art and visual culture and Central European modernism more broadly, in consideration of their own cultural, social and political margins.
