ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the symbolic role of the alpine landscape in official Austrian culture at regional, national, and international exhibitions. The steady exchange between rural and urban centres that the cultural and political emancipation of the provinces after the First World War had brought with it led to an unprecedented visibility of rural themes that could easily be absorbed into broader narratives about Austrian national culture – at home and abroad. Austria's turn towards alpine-inspired modernism allowed a redefinition of the country's cultural identity, which began developing in the 1920s before submerging into Austrofascist state ideology in the 1930s. Adopting some of the rhetoric surrounding regional exhibitions in the 1920s, Austria's international representation in the 1930s shows how the rural provinces were transformed into the defining element of Austria's international presentation, in which, unusually, it functioned as the modern half of Austrian identity, compared to the rather more nostalgic presentation of Vienna.
