ABSTRACT
This chapter stresses that the representation of minorities shaped rural-inspired art and visual culture, too, albeit in a different manner. ‘Gypsy’ images were a genre that became popular in the late Habsburg Empire and, by the interwar years, gained popular status as middle-brow art, while established stereotypes were revisited by modernist artists to forge a ‘local exotic’ in the Central European countryside. Meanwhile, photographs emphasised the Roma's position as social outcasts in a much more threatening manner. In combination, these images not only affirmed the ostracisation of the Roma in Central European culture as a rural and, thus, ‘uncivilised’ society, but also added to a manifestation of what constituted the ‘real’ Austrian landscape. By rendering the countryside of the Roma as a ‘timeless and placeless’ environment, a different side of the central European countryside came to the fore: one that was ‘foreign’, exotic, and threatening and could be simultaneously close and distant, transnational, and regional to ostracise, rather than include, a segment of the population.
