Good Living Street: Portrait of a Patron Family, Vienna 1900

Not since the publication of Carl Schorske’s Fin-De-Si癡cle Vienna has a book so brilliantly given us a close-up portrait of turn-of-the-century Vienna, as seen through the lives of an eminent family, the Gallias, among the city’s great patrons of the early twentieth century: their upper-class life; their rarefied collections of art and design; their religious life; and their daring flight from the Nazi Anschluss.
 
Tim Bonyhady, great-grandson of the Gallias, tells the story of the family’s middle-class prosperity from the provinces of Central Europe where they grew up to their arrival in Vienna, following the emperor’s proclamation that Jews had freedom of movement and residence, and shows how for the next two decades, the Vienna that became theirs was at the center of art, music, and ideas in all of Europe.
 
We see the amassing of the Gallias’ rarefied collections of art; their cosmopolitan society; and how, as Kristallnacht was raging, the family escaped to Australia and took with them the best private collection intact of modernist art and design.
 
An extraordinary portrait of a time and place.