Adolph Menzel’s Indian Café in the Vienna Prater. Staging America at world fairs of the 19th century
Exotic restaurants and cafés were among the most popular attractions for the general public at the world's fairs of the 19th century. Here, visitors could not only enjoy the food and drink of foreign countries, but also get to know their inhabitants. However, the so-called Indian Café at the Vienna World's Fair of 1873 does not fit easily into the history of comparable establishments. In the tepee erected in the Prater by New York entrepreneurs, the fashionable drinks of white America – cocktails – were not served by American Indians nor by Americans of European origin, but by Black Americans (just a few years after the official end of slavery in the USA). This project is about Menzel's exploration of the contemporary image of America as it was staged at the world's fairs of the 19th century in Europe, with a particular focus on the 1873 world's fair in Vienna.
Monika Wagner studied painting at the Kunstakademie in Kassel, before turning to art history and literature at universities in Hamburg and London. She was an academic assistant at the University of Tübingen, where she qualified as a professor in 1986. From 1987 to 2009 she taught art history at the University of Hamburg and directed the Funkkolleg Moderne Kunst. At the Hamburg Seminar, she built up the archive for research into material iconography. Her work focuses on the art of the 18th–20th centuries, the history and theory of perception, the design of public spaces and especially the semantics of artistic materials (Das Material der Kunst, 2001). Fellowships at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and the Getty Research Center in Los Angeles offered the opportunity to extend material analyses to architecture (Marmor und Asphalt, 2018). As a fellow in the research group »Bildevidenz« at the FU Berlin, she prepared the book Kunstgeschichte in Schwarz-Weiß. Reproduktionstechnik und Methode, which appeared in 2022.
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Marmor und Asphalt. Soziale Oberflächen im Berlin des 20. Jahrhunderts, Berlin 2018.
Kunstgeschichte in Schwarz-Weiss. Reproduktionstechnik und Methode, Göttingen 2022.
1873 reiste der durch seine Historienbilder Friedrichs des Großen berühmte Berliner Maler Adolph Menzel zur ersten Weltausstellung im deutschsprachigen Raum nach Wien. Doch widmete er sich weder den Exponaten noch dem Industriepalast mit der gigantischen Rotunde, dem Wahrzeichen der Wiener Weltausstellung, sondern einem vergleichsweise winzigen temporären Zelt: dem sogenannten Indianer-Café.