Nathan J. Timpano is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Miami, where he conducts research on modern art and visual culture in Europe and the Americas, with a specialty in German and Austrian Expressionism. He is author of Constructing the Viennese Modern Body: Art, Hysteria, and the Puppet (Routledge, 2017). You can find more about Nathan on Academia.edu, Instagram, and at his faculty page.
In his dryly sardonic “praise” of Jewish patronage in relation to the then-dominant Secessionist aesthetic, the polemical critic Karl Kraus (1874–1936)—who, not insignificantly, had renounced Judaism one year earlier—implicitly conveys his belief that the Wiener Moderne style was as superficial as the Jewish-owned, Jugendstil homes that populated Vienna at the fin de siècle. Here, Kraus’s words were likely meant to recall those of his close friend, the modern architect Adolf Loos (1870–1933). Loos had argued in April 1900 that the Vienna Secession (which had been formed in 1897) was now synonymous with the Jewish bourgeoisie