Dianne Isom and Dr. Rob McFarland, Department of German and Russian

Introduction

While the advent of digital archives have revolutionized the discipline of Women’s Studies, the current online offerings of visual and textual works by German-speaking women artists, especially Austrian artists, lag far behind the digital collections of their English-, French-, and Spanish-language contemporaries. Brigham Young University’s Sophie Digital Library project is the largest and most-used online archive of works by German-speaking women, but its collections focus only on literature, music and science. Using the successful and widely-used platform of the Sophie archive, my mentor and I attempted to help round out the archive’s collection with an extensive digital archive of visual and textual works by the works of Austrian artists. As a focus of this bibliography, we have included a special concentration on the women who contributed to the futurist movement that came to be known as “Viennese Kineticism.”

Methodology

From June to August Professor McFarland and I traveled to Vienna to complete a Study Abroad program and worked in the archives of the Museum der Stadt Wien. I had personal direction from Professor McFarland guiding me on where to look. There was work with Dr. Werner Michael Schwarz to find art by Austrian and German women that not yet been made available to scholars on the internet. The following books were the most helpful: Künstlerinnen Österreich — 20. Jahrhundert from the Neue Galerie der Stadt Linz Wolfgang-Gurlitt-Museum, Wiener Kinetismus E.G. Klien von Galerie Pabst, and Künstlerinnen in Osterreich 1897-1938 by Sabine Plakolm-Forsthuber. I also made copies of photographs of artworks and pages to upload to the Sophie Digital Library so that future scholars may access the photographs as well as summaries of the pages.

Results

I was able to discover names as well as some unknown works by German-speaking women from the hard copy of books and document them. The women and works I found were Erika Giovanna Klein (1900-1957), Broncia Koller (Pinell), Birgit Jürgenssen, Elfriede Trautner, Barbara Pflaum, Elisabeth Karlinsky, Gertrud Neuwirth, Elly Gschliesser, Marianne Ullmann, Elsa Kalmar de Köveshazi, Elena Luksch-Makowsky, and Teresa Ries.

Discussion

By providing a sophisticated, fleshed out bibliography to scholars and students of Austrian art history, our 2015 ORCA Mentored Learning Project will provide the users of the Sophie Digital Library with a clearinghouse of information and resources for their study of women in the visual arts.

Conclusion

Our bibliography includes the art works and/or writings of approximately 10 Austrian women artists. We have also included biographical information, short catalogues of their art works, and links to other resources. This will make it possible for the art community, students, and educators around the world to have more access to these women and their work. We hope that more uncovering and research on this topic will keep going on.