Julia Secklehner
Art & Photography Historian.
Humboldt Fellow at Constructor University Bremen (2024–2025): "Shifting the Gaze: Collective Practices of Socially Engaged Women’s Photography in Central Europe, 1928–1948"
Research fellow at the Department of Art History at Masaryk University, Brno: “Beyond the Village. Folk Cultures as Agents of Modernity, 1918-1945”
I specialise in art and visual culture in central Europe with a particular interest in gender and identity politics and intersections between high art and popular culture in the first half of the twentieth century.
Co-Convenor of The Lausanne Project: https://thelausanneproject.com
Recently completed collaborations include
"Continuity/Rupture: Art & Architecture in Central Europe, 1918-1939" (as research fellow) https://craace.com
“Creativity from Vienna to the World: Transatlantic Exchanges in Design and Pedagogy” (as PI) https://viennatotheworld.com
PhD in Art History (Courtauld Institute of Art, 2018)
MPhil in Czech (University of Glasgow, 2017)
https://www.juliasecklehner.com
Humboldt Fellow at Constructor University Bremen (2024–2025): "Shifting the Gaze: Collective Practices of Socially Engaged Women’s Photography in Central Europe, 1928–1948"
Research fellow at the Department of Art History at Masaryk University, Brno: “Beyond the Village. Folk Cultures as Agents of Modernity, 1918-1945”
I specialise in art and visual culture in central Europe with a particular interest in gender and identity politics and intersections between high art and popular culture in the first half of the twentieth century.
Co-Convenor of The Lausanne Project: https://thelausanneproject.com
Recently completed collaborations include
"Continuity/Rupture: Art & Architecture in Central Europe, 1918-1939" (as research fellow) https://craace.com
“Creativity from Vienna to the World: Transatlantic Exchanges in Design and Pedagogy” (as PI) https://viennatotheworld.com
PhD in Art History (Courtauld Institute of Art, 2018)
MPhil in Czech (University of Glasgow, 2017)
https://www.juliasecklehner.com
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Journal Articles by Julia Secklehner
The Slovak photographer Irena Blühová’s work to date has been confined to historical analyses in terms of her camera-based social activism for the Czechoslovak Communist Party and her education at the Dessau Bauhaus. In order to expand discussion, this paper re-evaluates selected photographs to show that there is another politics to Blühová’s work besides capturing the lives of Slovakia’s rural population: the politics of gender. I put forward the suggestion Blühová’s work be considered not only as agitational in terms of socialist politics, but to also inscribe notions of gender into her photographic practice that respond to international and local socio-political developments. Doing so challenges the reductive division of her work between ‘political activism’ and ‘Bauhaus student’, as well as a binary dynamic between communism and artistic modernism. The paper maps out two different male and female identities, one closely aligned with socialist realist ideals, the other corresponding with the emerging figure of the New Woman in the interwar years (1918-1939).
Book Chapters by Julia Secklehner
In fourteen original, cutting-edge essays by established experts and emerging scholars, this book reveals how Bauhaus artists challenged traditional ideas about bodies and gender. Written to appeal to students, scholars, and the broad public, Bauhaus Bodies will be essential reading for anyone interested in modern art, architecture, design history, and gender studies; it will define conversations and debates during the 2019 centenary of the Bauhaus's founding and beyond.
Essays by Julia Secklehner
The Slovak photographer Irena Blühová’s work to date has been confined to historical analyses in terms of her camera-based social activism for the Czechoslovak Communist Party and her education at the Dessau Bauhaus. In order to expand discussion, this paper re-evaluates selected photographs to show that there is another politics to Blühová’s work besides capturing the lives of Slovakia’s rural population: the politics of gender. I put forward the suggestion Blühová’s work be considered not only as agitational in terms of socialist politics, but to also inscribe notions of gender into her photographic practice that respond to international and local socio-political developments. Doing so challenges the reductive division of her work between ‘political activism’ and ‘Bauhaus student’, as well as a binary dynamic between communism and artistic modernism. The paper maps out two different male and female identities, one closely aligned with socialist realist ideals, the other corresponding with the emerging figure of the New Woman in the interwar years (1918-1939).
In fourteen original, cutting-edge essays by established experts and emerging scholars, this book reveals how Bauhaus artists challenged traditional ideas about bodies and gender. Written to appeal to students, scholars, and the broad public, Bauhaus Bodies will be essential reading for anyone interested in modern art, architecture, design history, and gender studies; it will define conversations and debates during the 2019 centenary of the Bauhaus's founding and beyond.
When new political elites and social structures emerge out of a historical rupture, how are art and architecture affected? In 1918 the political map of Central Europe was redrawn as a result of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, marking a new era for the region. Our project examines the impact of this political discontinuity in three of Austria-Hungary’s successor states: Austria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. For many centuries, the entire territory of these countries had been ruled by the Habsburgs, and the shared memory of this imperial past created a common cultural space, even as the newly formed nation states were asserting themselves in opposition to that memory. Furthermore, that opposition was not constant. Governments sometimes encouraged a sense of historical caesura, but at other times looked to the past for legitimation, as required by their short- and long-term political goals. The Habsburg Empire cast a long shadow, and artists and architects had to engage with its legacy as they navigated the highly fraught political and cultural landscape of their own time.
19th Annual Czech & Slovak Studies Workshop, University of Austin at Texas, 5th April 2019.
Workshop ‘1918 and its Legacy: In the Shadow of Empire and War’, Midlands Network: Central and Eastern European History, German and Russian Studies, University of Nottingham, 8th December 2018.
History of Art and Film Seminar Series, University of Leicester, 5th December 2018
My paper focuses on the Czech left-wing, satirical student magazine Trn (1924-1931) and how it articulated the ideas of the young Czechoslovak Left in popular culture. A particular point of focus is Trn’s early references to the writer Jaroslav Hašek and his novel The Good Soldier Švejk. First published in 1921, Švejk soon came to be seen as a national representation of ‘the Czech’, while concurrently representing a ‘fierce individualist who resist[s] all attempts of moulding’ him into society. These interpretations provide useful links between Trn and the novel, according to which the magazine’s use of humour becomes a form of critique that implicitly places Trn into a new Czech literary and visual tradition, firmly anchored within the establishment of the First Czechoslovak Republic. However, Trn represented a political opposition movement rather than mainstream society, using elements of popular culture against the government and as an expression of alternative culture, closely tied to socialist politics. Trn’s extraordinary position between popular and avant-garde culture, radical politics and popular entertainment thus shaped the public image of the young Left through humour, representing a new generation of Czechs who saw the newly established First Czechoslovak Republic as the first step towards a socialist future.
My paper considers the creation of visual difference in the Austrian popular satirical press after the so-called Schattendorf Trial (1927), when the burning of Vienna’s Palace of Justice brought the country to the brink of civil war and paved the way for Austro-fascism in 1934 and the Anschluss to the Third Reich in 1938. While the far-left Leuchtrakete (1923-1934) creates a strong socialist identity with attacks on the conservative Christian Social Party’s staunch Catholicism, the moderately socialist Götz von Berlichingen (1919-1934) distances itself from working-class protesters by employing an imagery of the Bolshevik foreign perpetrator. The Christian Social Kikeriki (1861-1933) focuses on extreme anti-Semitic depictions, linking its greatest ideological and political opponent, the Social Democrats, with Russian Bolshevism and Vienna’s Jewish community. Yet, anti-Semitic depictions are also evident in Der Götz, which stereotypes the ‘Jewish capitalist’ as a Christian Social ally.
In consideration of anti-Semitic attacks in satirical magazines on both sides of the political spectrum, paired with anti-Catholicism by the Left and anti-Bolshevism by the Right, an incoherent image of interwar ‘Austrianness’ in the popular press emerges. However, in the aftermath of the Schattendorf Trial the Right strengthens its public identity as coherently Catholic, Germanic and conservative, while the Left’s self-representation can only be interpreted as a crisis of identity: their use of both anti-Semitism and anti-Bolshevism in the popular press denies the formation of an ‘appropriate representative’ for the party, and, by extension, their definition of the nation as a whole.
Wage labour, class, and the female avant-garde, 1920–1948
A workshop held at Constructor University, Bremen
15–16 May 2025
Central Europe’s modernist movements in the twentieth century have widely been accepted as middle-class phenomena, driven by figures with the education, time, and financial resources to devote themselves to creative production. Yet, as the First World War shook up the social and economic stability of many, comfortable backgrounds no longer guaranteed support. Women, in particular, found themselves in a new situation, not only gaining new liberties in the post-imperial successor states but often also facing the need to make a living. How did this affect their creativity and access to artistic education and production?
From privately sold goods made in the home to administrative work and wage labour, women artists in the 1920s and 30s followed various professions to support themselves, their (artist) partners, and their dependents. While some of this work was to make ends meet, other activities, such as journalism and editorial work, craftwork, teaching and photography, also played an essential role in developing their artistic practice. Taking this as a point of departure, this workshop addresses the invisible (wage) labour of modernist women artists and how it affected their creative work in different fields. It seeks to examine the ambivalences of paid and creative work faced and negotiated by individuals and their impact on our understanding of modernist artistic production.
The workshop invites proposals for papers exploring examples and case studies that analyse the role of paid work in women’s artistic production. Studies can be comparative and historical analyses that take into account questions of gender, class, and race and approach the subject through, for example, art history, visual culture, labour history, or gender studies. While the main focus is on central Europe, contributions that examine examples from other geographies from the 1920s to the 1940s are welcome.
Specific questions that might be addressed include, for example:
- To what extent did the necessity to follow a profession to make a living foster and develop women’s creative practice in the first half of the twentieth century?
- Which kinds of professions were particularly important in helping to develop women’s artistic practice? Which ones remained invisible?
- How did questions of class impact women artists and designers’ opportunities and skills in relation to both wage labour and creative work?
- How did women artists and designers respond to socioeconomic challenges in their creative practice?
- How did the political stances of individual organisers, designers and artists influence their work?
- How did women artists and designers address topics of (women’s) work and labour? How did they subvert and reject wage labour through their creative practice?
- In what ways does our understanding of women’s contributions to modernism change in light of their multiple activities?
Proposals are invited of 200–300 words for a presentation of 20 minutes in length, accompanied by a brief speaker CV. They should be submitted to [email protected] and [email protected]
Speakers will be provided with one night’s accommodation in Bremen and a modest travel subsidy.
For enquiries, feel free to contact Dr Julia Secklehner at [email protected]
The deadline for submissions is 15 December 2024.
Notification of acceptance of proposals will be issued on 30 December 2024.
Vernacular modernisms, nostalgia and the avant-garde
CRAACE workshop, 6–7 December 2019
East Slovak Gallery, Košice (Slovakia)
In the decades before 1918 there was a vibrant debate over the nature of ‘national art’ in Central Europe. For many this was embodied in folk art and culture. By 1914, this idea was increasingly challenged by avant-garde interests in the metropolis. After the War, however, a return to folk art and regionalism was revisited and gained increasing importance in the decades leading up the Second World War. Within a broad artistic landscape, folk art and culture was used to search for a fundamental essence of human culture, as in the case of the Hungarian painters Lajos Vajda and Dezső Korniss; to create a ‘national style’ with reinterpretations of folk art, as in 1920s Czechoslovakia; and to seek renewal outside a lost imperial capital, like in Austria.
Merged with modern culture, reinterpretations of folk art developed as manifold ‘vernacular modernisms’ which emphasised the importance of local tradition in the post-imperial environment. Which ideals formed the core of these ‘vernacular modernisms’? What was the relationship between ‘vernacular modernism’ and the avant-garde? How did regional and cosmopolitan approaches to art and architecture overlap and influence each other?
As part of the ERC-funded project Continuity / Rupture? Art and Architecture in Central Europe 1918–1939 this workshop re-examines the place the avant-garde is granted in art history by looking at a broader artistic landscape that to a large extent engaged in folk art and culture. Considering intersections and overlaps between the avant-garde, ‘moderate’, and ‘reactionary’ developments in modern art and architecture, it challenges traditional hierarchies and assesses the role that a renewed attention to folk art played in the formation of a multi-faceted artistic environment across Central Europe.
Proposals (300 words) are invited for 30-minute papers that examine topics such as:
- Folk art as a resource for Central European Modernism after 1918
- Regionalism in interwar art and architecture
- Folk art and identity politics in interwar modernism
- The fragmentation of Central European cultural centres after 1918
- The emancipation of regional galleries and museums
- The relationship between regional and central artistic networks
- Reactionary modernism vs. renewal through folk culture
The deadline for submission of proposals is 1 July 2019. Submissions should be sent to: [email protected]
Templeman Gallery, Floor 1 West, University of Canterbury, Kent
This exhibition showcased a selection of original material, reprints, published material and paraphernalia by American and British comic artists, representing two prolific traditions in alternative comics.
The artists whose work was displayed include:
Andy Singer
Cristy C. Road
Darrin Bell
Gord Hill
Hunt Emerson
J.J. McCollough
James van Otto
Jen Sorensen
Kate Evans
Khalid Albaih
Lauren Weinstein
Matt Bors
Mike Goodwin and Dan E. Burr
Rachael House
Robert Armstrong
Safdar Ahmed
Spike Trotman
Stephanie McMillan
Suzy Varty
Ted Rall
Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)
Vegan Sidekick
The exhibition also included materials from the British Cartoon Archive and the Les Coleman Archive.
The works displayed are commonly labelled as alternative in their respective traditions and understood as critically positioning themselves against a given mainstream (whether in comics, politics or culture).
Through the displayed material, and drawing on the position of comics as an underground or marginal form, the exhibition investigated the issue of what it means to be ‘alternative’ and ‘critical’ in contemporary society.