Presentation and panel discussion on new approaches to the art and design of the fin-de-siecle. In-person.

When: 27 May 2022, 18:00 — 19:20
Venue: Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
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Inspired by the launch of two brilliant books on the subject of Art Nouveau and Jugendstil, this event explores new approaches to the art and design of the fin-de-siecle. The decades around 1900 were marked by the pursuit of new aesthetic responses to the challenges of a rapidly changing world and share many parallels with the present day. The evening will take the form of a presentation followed by a panel discussion with responses from two scholars in the field and an open Q&A with the audience.


Charlotte Ashby is an art and design historian based at Birkbeck, University of London. She is the author of Art Nouveau: Art, Architecture and Design in Transformation (Bloomsbury 2021). Her research focuses on issues of nationalism, transnational exchange and the formation of modern identities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her current research explores the cultural impact of the global circulation of ideas, objects and people in the era of colonialism.

Sabine Wieber is Lecturer at History of Art, School of Culture and Creative Arts, University of Glasgow. She is the author of Jugendstil Women and the Making of Modern Design (Bloomsbury 2021). Her research focusses on nineteenth/early twentieth-century Austrian and German art, architecture and design with a particular interest in the domestic interior. She has published widely on issues of German national identity, gender politics and identity, exhibition politics and display strategies.

Diane V Silverthorne is a ‘Vienna 1900’ scholar, music lover, and specialist in European art and design of the long nineteenth century. She has taught extensively at Birkbeck and at the University of the Arts, London. Reflecting these interest, Diane’s edited anthology, Music, Art and Performance from Liszt to Riot Grrrl (Bloomsbury), is now available in soft-back. She has published widely on the aesthetics of music and the visual arts, as well as on Vienna café culture, and does an excellent impersonation of the young Alma Mahler.

Tag Gronberg is Reader Emerita, Birkbeck College, University of London. Tag Gronberg’s research interests include gender and modernism, particularly across art, design and architecture. Her books on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century visual culture in France and Austria extend the study of gender and urban modernity to incorporate debates on architecture, craft and consumption. She has published on issues to do with memory, including the recent retrieval and display of Titanic artefacts. Her current projects explore gender and 1920s visual culture in France, Austria and Britain, including fashion, photography, film and interior design.


Full details and booking

This event is held as part of Arts Week 2022, a festival of the latest creativity and research from Birkbeck’s School of Arts