Page - 291 - in Rudolf Eitelberger von Edelberg - Netzwerker der Kunstwelt

Marsha Morton Rudolf von Eitelberger and Leopold Carl Müller Constructing a Genre of Viennese Orientalism When Rudolf von Eitelberger surveyed the state of Austrian art in 1873 during the Vienna World’s Fair, he observed with satisfaction that much improvement had been made in architecture and the applied arts. Painting, however, had not remained com- petitive with French and British achievements, which were, in his opinion, superior in patronage, training, and production.1 Four years later, he confided in a letter that the current condition of genre painting was unacceptable : “die gegenwärtigen Vertreter des Genrebildes in Wien sind nicht auf der Höhe der Zeit”2. Earlier he had commented on the need for fresh ideas and energy at the Academy of Fine Arts, noting that members of the painting faculty were outmoded in their views as well as “älter und kränklich”3. To rectify the situation, Eitelberger’s public response was to participate in the restructuring of the Academy in 1872, to contribute to the organization of the retrospective bicen- tennial Kunstausstellung der Wiener Akademie in 1877, and to publish polemical articles shaming Austrians into supporting the arts.4 Privately, he put his efforts into recruiting painters like Leopold Carl Müller, whom he pursued tenaciously for four years between 1874–1878 in letters to Cairo and Venice, where Müller lived at the time. Their epistolary exchange, in which Ferdinand Lauf- berger (a professor at the Kunstgewerbeschule) also participated as a mutual friend and advisor, centered on two transactions : negotiating a state-sponsored commission for a large canvas and hiring a very reluctant Müller to be a Professor at the Academy. Eitel- berger’s respect for Müller only deepened over time, culminating in a full-length essay he published in 1881 in Die Presse, which was the first article to appear on the painter in Austria. Eitelberger’s intervention in Müller’s career was timely and effective, com- ing at a turning point when the forty-year-old artist had just begun to live and work 1 R. Eitelberger von Edelberg, Öffentliche Kunstpflege, in : Kunst und Kunstgewerbe auf der Wiener Weltausstellung 1873 (ed. C. v. Lützow), Leipzig 1875, pp.  262–277, esp. p.  262. 2 Eitelberger to L.  C. Müller, 29  June 1877, reprinted in : Leopold Carl Müller 1834–1892. Ein Kün- stlerbildnis nach Briefen und Dokumenten (ed. H. Zemen), Vienna 2001, p.  310. 3 Eitelberger to Müller, 26  December 1876, in : Zemen (ed.), Leopold Carl Müller (cit. n.  2), p.  277. 4 See, for example, R. Eitelberger von Edelberg, Leopold  K. Müller, in : Die Presse, No.  221, 12  August 1881, pp.  1 f.; reprinted in : Zemen (ed.), Leopold Carl Müller (cit. n.  2), pp.  403–407, esp. p.  406.