Eyre, Nancy
Rediscovering Olga Wisinger-Florian
Faculty Mentor: Michelle James, Department of German and Russian
The project Rediscovering Olga Wisinger-Florian culminated in the compilation of an
online bibliography of secondary texts about the Austrian artist Olga Wisinger-Florian
combined with a biography and catalogue of visual works by the artist published in The
Sophie Digital Library (http://sophie.byu.edu). This will make it possible for scholars,
students, educators, and the art community around the world to have access to Olga
Wisinger-Florian’s work.
As evidenced by the canon of Western art, female artists have generally been left out
except for a select few. Female artists have undeniably been a present influence and
with the advent of the Digital Archive the available resources of works and texts created
by these women are more accessible than before. However, the availability of these
resources by German speaking women lags behind that of their English speaking, French speaking,
and Spanish speaking contemporaries. The Sophie Digital Library works to fill this gap and is
strong in the area of literature, music and science but is still lacking in the area of art,
especially that of Austrian women. This project will round out the archive with the addition
of an extensive bibliography and biographical information on Olga Wisinger-Florian.
Although one can search Google for Olga Wisinger-Florian and find a Wikipedia page
that references her, scholarly resources are limited beyond a few bibliographic
references. A handful of Wisinger-Florian’s paintings are on display at the Leopold
Museum and the Belvedere Museum, both of which are some of the most renowned
museums in Vienna. However, images of these paintings or references to them cannot
be found on the Leopold Museum’s website which is a good example of the lack of
available references about Olga Wisinger-Florian. On the Belvedere’s website only
biographical information is easily accessible. Wisinger-Florian achieved international
recognition through participation in international exhibitions in cities like Paris, Prague,
Berlin, and even Chicago. Her works were also exhibited in the Secession building, a
space that was created by a group of Viennese artists called the Secessionists with the
motto “to each time its art and its art its freedom”. Many of her contemporaries, such as
Gustav Klimt, who were also featured at the Secession building, remain the highlights of
many collections in Vienna. Somewhere along the way Olga Wisinger-Florian
was forgotten as a focus of attention. I hypothesize that this is due to the fact that her work
was overshadowed by her male contemporaries.
In order to accomplish this goal of an online bibliography and catalogue, first I
conducted research to find references to Olga Wisinger-Florian
in books and online scholarly journals through the use of databases like JSTOR and WorldCat.
I recorded the bibliographic information of relevant texts and am working towards completing
brief annotations about the information found in the texts. The annotations will help those
accessing the bibliography to sort through the material in order to decipher what is
useful for their own purposes. Secondly, I created a list of paintings by Wisinger-Florian
with their title, date, and location. I am currently in the process of compiling all of these
images into a catalogue. I have been able to obtain many of the digital image rights from the
Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (the Austrian National Library) and am working with the Belvedere
museum to obtain rights to images they own. For the images I have been unable to
obtain the rights to, I have included a link to the image along with the title and date of
the painting. For the researcher’s benefit, I have written a biographical sketch
about Olga Wisinger-Florian that will be included in the Sophie Digital Library with the final
compilation of the bibliography and catalogue.
Through my research, I have found it difficult to find a large amount of secondary
sources that I felt should be included in the bibliography. I found many references to
various sources, but was unable to obtain the sources because many are only available
in Austria. For this reason, I left a number of sources out of the bibliography since I
could not verify their relevance and the texts would not be available to a larger audience
that would be utilizing the digital library. This problem, however, exposed an area of
further research and translation for texts that are only available in German.
Once the project Rediscovering Olga Wisinger-Florian is completed and the proper
digital formatting is finalized, the project will result in the publication of
biographical sketch, a thorough bibliography of secondary sources, and a catalogue of
artworks in the Sophie Digital Library by the end of September 2016.