Table of Contents

An Introduction to the Total Work of Art
Ubiquitous Gesamtkunstwerk—Reverent Misunderstandings—Nationalism and Internationalism—Medium Specificity and Interdisciplinarity
1. The Utopian Gesamtkunstwerk
Revolutionary Dresden—Origins and Sources—The Gesamtkunstwerk of the Future—The Audience of the Future
2. Building Bayreuth
Theoretical Architecture—Gottfried Semper and Munich—The Bayreuth Festspielhaus—Efficient Auditorium—The Mystical Abyss
3. Empathy Abstracted
Aesthetic Empathy—Empathy and Relief—Psychological Empathy—Empathy and Abstraction—Self-Estrangement and the Fear of Space
4. The Nietzschean Festival
Georg Fuchs and the Cult of Nietzsche—The Darmstadt Artists' Colony—Peter Behrens, Theater Reformer—The Stage of the Future—The Prinzregententheater
5. Retheatricalizing the Theater
Ausstellung München 1908—The Munich Artists' Theater—Abstraction on a Shallow Stage—Adolf Hildebrand and Relief Sculpture—Critical Responses
6. The Specter of Cinema
Projections in Munich—Advertising and Consumption—Hugo Münsterberg and the Photoplay—Reproducing Sound—Absorption and Distraction
7. Bauhaus Theater of Human Dolls
Theater at the Bauhaus—Automata, Marionettes, and Dolls-Spectators and Estrangement—The Triadic Ballet—Costume Parties and the Gesamtkunstwerk
8. Invisible Wagner
Intoxication and Addiction—Sorcery, Conducting, and Hypnosis—Theodor Adorno, Phantasmagorical History, and Failure—Dilettantism—Haunting Modernism
Notes
Bibliography
Index

About the Author

Juliet Koss is associate professor and chair of art history at Scripps College and coordinator of the Joint Art History Program of the Claremont Colleges.

Reviews

“This is an extraordinary book: thoughtful, deft, and learned, it offers a compelling revisionist account of the history and destiny of the Gesamtkunstwerk. The implications for our understanding of the Gesamtkunstwerk are transformative: this book challenges us to rethink not only a conventional history, but our propensity to parrot a conventional party line of that history.” —David J. Levin, University of Chicago; Executive Editor, The Opera Quarterly
 

“A radically revisionist, and convincing, case that the nineteenth-century ideal of the total work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk) and the modernist concept of estrangement are locked in dialogue rather than opposition, Juliet Koss’s book is necessary reading for historians of modern spectatorship across the spectrum of art and architectural history, media and cultural studies, politics, and critical theory.” —Barry Bergdoll, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art

“This book constitutes a major intervention in the study of modernism both within, and well beyond, the fields of architecture and art history. Modernism after Wagner traverses astonishingly diverse terrain. Avoiding the elegiac register of recent studies, Juliet Koss brings to an impossibly expansive subject a welcome historical precision, laced with mordant wit.” —Tim Barringer, Yale University