Biedermeier Lifestyles: Exhibition

An exhibition at the Hungarian National Gallery looks at art and culture in the post-Napoleonic age—begging questions about how this relates to the society of today.

“Biedermeier Lifestyles” is the title of an exhibition currently running at the Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest. It is a title that will possibly need explanation. In Hungary, people know what Biedermeier means. It is a name associated with domesticity, with provincial contentment, with an absence of ambition, a willingness to stay at home and cultivate the minor arts of cookery, woodwork and choral singing. Provincial, small-town lifestyles, in other words. “Biedermeier” is not an A-list term, it is associated by default with mediocrity. Historically, it refers to the period described by the first half of the 19^th century: beginning with Napoleon’s defeat and the Congress of Vienna of 1815, which reconfigured a map of Europe that had been completely tossed about by Napoleonic empire-building. The Biedermeier age lasted until 1848. As time wore on, it became associated with a notion of political instincts being stifled, of talent hiding itself under a bushel for fear of the censors. Nagging discontent, in many countries, eventually erupted in full-scale revolution. 

What is biedermeier?

The term Biedermeier derives from a personal name. A “Mr Biedermeier” is an average sort of Joe Bloggs, comfortably off and thoroughly middle class, congenitally suburban, proud of his allotment and of his prize marrows; proud of the rosettes his daughter wins at the pony club. Both the working classes and the upper classes turn up their noses at Mr Biedermeier. 

But what if he is not quite the nonentity one might think? What if he deliberately under-achieves, deliberately stays at home, deliberately chooses to content himself with being a town councillor rather that aiming for a seat in the national parliament? 

Not therefore humble he who seeks retreat, 
Pride guides his steps and bids him shun the great. 

Thus sniffed Alexander Pope, in his Moral Essays (1754). Mr Biedermeier has made a conscious decision not even to try to be great. He knows that pride comes before a fall and he is too well aware of the dangers. He does not want to be cancelled, or Twitter-stormed, or whatever the contemporary equivalent was of being publicly shamed in the Napoleonic age. Mr Biedermeier is the originator of what we now call self-censorship.

The early years of Biedermeier and the emergence of “lifestyles”

It did not begin this way: in the first years after 1815, things probably seemed rosy. The age of despotic, absolute monarchs was passing—or that was how it appeared. King Louis had had his head cut off. Napoleon was in exile. The post-Napoleonic years were years of bourgeois boom. A growing middle class rushed in to fill the space between aristocrats and their indentured villeins. So while “Biedermeier” began as a term poking fun at petit bourgeois taste, it later came to define an era where art focused not on monarchical propaganda or ecclesiastical brainwashing and guilt-tripping, but on the domestic sphere, on family, on the simple pleasures of hearth and fireside, on nature rambles, on the individual—but not as Superman, more as amateur enthusiast playing the violin or classifying butterflies. These were the “Biedermeier Lifestyles”. In Central Europe, art societies were founded, along with various other clubs; national newspapers went into circulation—and a burgeoning of national feeling accompanied this. Hungary composed its national anthem in 1823.

In England, in 1822, less than a decade after Napoleon had been sent into exile, a little piece of doggerel began doing the rounds. It mocked the middle-class pretensions of the new sector of society, people no longer content with rude village toil but who aspired to Biedermeier lifestyles in towns:

Man to the plough, Wife to the cow
Girl to the yarn, Boy to the barn
And your rent will be netted.

Man tally-ho, Miss piano
Wife silk and satin, Boy Greek and Latin
And you’ll all be Gazetted!

In the “good old days”, in other words, men worked in the fields, women laboured in the dairy, daughters spun yarn, boys mucked out the stables, and everyone was content. In the new era, men have turned into squires and go out hunting, their wives are decked out in the latest fashions, their daughters play sonatinas while their sons are shaped for white-collar careers. Little do they know, but they are all destined for bankruptcy. This Budapest exhibition demonstrates that those same aspirations to a better lifestyle pertained in Biedermeier Hungary: women no longer sat at spinning wheels at their cottage doors; they became ladies, inhabited over-furnished boudoirs with ruched fabrics, lace doilies, cherry-wood veneer, macramé and ormolu, and here they played the harp, mastered cross-stitch, read novels and painted watercolours. Gentlemen improved their land, collected clocks, catalogued yet more butterflies. Schubert is the ultimate Biedermeier figure: the humble composer meeting in the evenings with a small group of friends, singing romantic part songs round a piano.

art of the biedermeier age

The art of the period reflects this, too. Painters spent a lot of time celebrating the individual—the ordinary man and woman, not kings and cardinals. We find likenesses of worthy burghers, of saccharine sweet children, idealisations of the state of motherhood, and comfortable paintings of nuclear family scenes. Artists were inspired by themes of love, flirtation and betrothal—presumably because these were popular with their patrons. In Hungary, Miklós Barabás was the master of this genre, producing portraits and symbolic love scenes, for example Pigeon Post (1843), where a young girl looks dreamily out at us, while cuddling the dove that has just delivered an amorous missive from her beau. 

The beauties of nature—tame or sublime, foreign or domestic—were also celebrated. Károly Markó is the great early Hungarian exponent. And as urban populations grew, social ills became a popular theme, yielding romanticised scenes of abandoned single mothers, of ragged urchins touting their meagre wares on freezing street corners.

biedermeier and revolution

But perhaps a little like the 18^th-century Tulip Period in Ottoman Turkey, the Biedermeier era in Austria and Hungary was an age of shallow escapism. The indifference of ruler towards the ruled was as great as it had ever been and tensions began to simmer below the surface. In Vienna and Budapest, in 1848, a growing mood of restlessness escalated into revolution. The emperor Ferdinand panicked, immediately announced that he consented to all the people’s demands, and signed the so-called April Laws, by which feudalism was abolished and following which Hungary embarked on a path to self-determination. But then, under some duress, he abdicated, and his successor, Franz Joseph, was cut from a different cloth. He was not prepared to ratify the April Laws; in return he was not recognised by Hungary and was later declared deposed by the Hungarian revolutionary government. All-out war ensued, put down with the help of Russia, and a period of repression followed, with Hungary controlled with an iron fist, until the Compromise Agreement of 1867, which established the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary.

The Biedermeier Lifestyles exhibition has two good works of art that illustrate the tensions of these final, febrile years: In Va Banque by the Viennese artist Eduard Swoboda (1849), a group of card players is shown gripped by suspense as a young lady dressed completely in white calmly prepares to bet her all against an opponent who has just put down his second ace. In Pilvax (also 1849), a watercolour by József Preiszler, we see the famed Budapest coffee house where the revolutionary poet Sándor Petőfi and other young hotheads gathered to chatter each other into a ferment. Though Jonathan Swift may wisely have warned that “It is a folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffee-house for the voice of the kingdom”, the echo of the Pilvax, its vaulted ceiling black with tobacco smirch from the long-stemmed csibuk pipes smoked by all the ranting young men, did indeed come to be portrayed as the voice of the kingdom: and the kingdom wanted radical change.

Is Biedermeier relevant today?

The mildness and mediocrity of all the Biedermeier art, the tameness of the lifestyles depicted in this show, disguise a deeper message. 2024 was a year of elections across the globe. How many people, resigned to a result they did not want, in various different countries and for different sets of reasons, have claimed that they plan to keep their heads down, to learn a language, master a musical instrument, enjoy a foreign holiday, cultivate their garden? Politicians these days don’t listen to electorates, that is the wide perception. Perhaps we are entering a new Biedermeier Age of our own.

In Central Europe, it is easier to spot the signs. The Enlightenment in Austria and Hungary—and what it meant in terms of social progress—took a different form from the way it appeared in Britain and North America. There, it made claims for the freedom of the individual; for a sovereignty of the people unshackled from central government. In Central Europe, however, under Maria Theresa and her heirs, “Enlightenment” was seen as an advance towards the common good via the benign autocracy of an all-knowing state. 

As debates raged across the world during the Covid pandemic, about how populations should co-ordinate their response, one might have considered this Central European interpretation of Enlightenment. What would Thomas Paine have said about governments awarding themselves special powers? Would John Locke have approved of lockdown for all?

Rousseau, in all likelihood, would have been an enthusiastic supporter of vaccine passports. In The Social Contract, he wrote that “Whoever refuses to obey the general will will be forced to do so by the entire body; this means merely that he will be forced to be free.”

But this sentence has bothered people ever since. How can freedom be mandated? How can enforcement and freedom come to the same thing? Do we, as citizens, know what is good for us, or should we stick to our parlour games while omniscient experts make decisions on our behalf? An interesting article on this very topic can be found in the Monmouth Magazine. In the light of all this, and of what societies the world over have gone through in the last four to five years, this exhibition, “Biedermeier Lifestyles”, at the Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest, is timely.

ABB