Good Living Street:
The Fortunes of My Viennese Family
Tim Bonyhady, Allen and Unwin,
Sydney, 456p, rrp$35
ISBN: 9781742371467
JON ALTMAN
T
im Bonyhady translates the address
Wohllebengasse in Austrian into ‘Good
Living Street’ in English. The ‘fortunes’ of his
Viennese family explored here are multiple
and contradictory. One is material fortune, the
moveable contents of No.4 Wohllebengasse, a
significant private collection of Austrian art and
design that escapes Nazi confiscation. Much of
the collection was commissioned from artists
of the Austrian Secession, a breakaway antiestablishment fin-de-siècle arts movement, and
then from the Wiener Werkstätte, or Vienna
Workshop, a modernist arts and crafts cooperative
established in 1903. Also explored are the life
fortunes (and fortitudes) of Bonyhady’s immediate
family as they flee Vienna just after Kristallnacht,
the Night of Broken Glass, the infamous pogrom
that signaled the end of Vienna as a humming
cosmopolitan centre for people of Jewish ethnicity
who had invested so much in its creation.
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Vienna to an extremely crowded and modest flat
in Cremorne, Sydney – so crowded that some
exquisite Josef Hoffman designed furniture had
to be ‘cropped’ to fit in. After his mother’s death
in 2003 and on inheriting a handful of Gretl’s
numerous diaries (despite her requested they be
destroyed) and some autobiographical notes by
Anne, he began a prolonged personal odyssey
that has culminated in an extraordinary book.
holistic arts philosophy of the Vienna Workshop (he
was chairman of the Board for a period); in part a
financial investment linked to an attempt to cement
what proves to be a precarious social position in
the upper echelons of Viennese society. When the
apartment on ‘Good Living Street’ was built, early
industrial designer extraordinaire Josef Hoffman, of
geometric style with functional simplicity fame, was
commissioned to design and decorate five rooms.
This is a big sprawling book divided into four
parts.The first, ‘Hermine’, focuses on Bonyhady’s
great grandmother, the subject of a commissioned
portrait by the incomparable modernist Gustav Klimt.
Moritz and Hermine Gallia moved to Vienna in the
late 19th century from regional Austria and quickly
became wealthy industrialists investing heavily in
first gas and then electric lighting manufacture. From
the turn of the 20th century, influenced by the artist
and arts entrepreneur Carl Moll, ‘the impresario
of the Vienna Moderne’, they became involved as
patrons with the Austrian Secession and the Vienna
Workshop. As their wealth grew with global demand
for modern lighting, so did their patronage of the
arts, with a collection that included works by Moll,
Ferdinand Welmüller, Koloman Moser and perhaps
most significantly Gustav Klimt and modernist
architect/designer/artist Josef Hoffman. Their
opulence was such that Moriz Gallia was able to
purchase Giovanni Segantini’s Le Cattive Madri (‘The
Evil Mothers’) for the Austrian state in 1901 for a then
estimated $1 million, a painting now on permanent
display in the palatial Belvedere Complex and
generally regarded as his most significant work. For
his generous philanthropy Moriz was awarded the
title of Imperial Councillor by Emperor Franz Josef.
The second and third parts of the book, ‘Gretl’
and ‘Annelore’, document the fall from grace: how
the fortunes of the Gallia family decline, first after
the premature death of Moritz Gallia in 1918, then
with economic turbulence associated with political
change in Austria between the wars, hyperinflation
and the Depression. And so we share the experience
over twenty years of this decline to a more
circumscribed, but still very comfortable, situation.
With the death of Hermine in 1936, the collection is
divided between three surviving offspring. The coup
de grâce for the family comes two years later with
the devastating impacts of anti-Semitism despite
their conversion to Christianity decades earlier.
Arts aficionados will be mesmerised here by
Bonyhady’s meticulous research of Vienna as an
important centre of European arts modernism. This
period before the outbreak of World War I is filled
with the excitement of all forms of emerging modern
art movements and the family’s regular engagements
with gala events at the opera, concerts and the
theatre both in Vienna and elsewhere in Europe.
Here we learn in fine detail about the genesis and
growth of the Gallia Collection over twenty years.
Moritz Gallia’s motivations were multiple: in part
a passion for the arts and increasingly for the
In these parts of the book we share the deep
pathos of traumatised refugees at first welcomed to
Australia and looking to integrate into a new society
after being brutally expelled from another, and
then automatically transformed into ‘enemy aliens’
with the declaration of war in 1939. Bonyhady tells
this part of Australia’s war and immediate postwar
social history with remarkable dispassion and yet
leaves no doubt that such issues resonate with
the present: just how bad Australia as a nation is
in welcoming people from elsewhere; how people
damaged by one failed attempt at assimilation
must struggle anew to assimilate in a radically
different environment; and populist skepticism
towards the benefits of eastern European culture.
These themes are developed further in the
final part of the book, ‘Anne’, that documents
the transformed life of Annelore, as an adult,
an academic and teacher, a single mother for
decades, and as someone still emotionally torn
between a past with deep adolescent meaning in
Vienna and a tormented present as she strives
to adjust to her new life in postwar Australia.
The book opens in a captivating way:
removalists are packing crates of household
effects, including art, to be spirited away by three
women refugees from Austria to Australia as Nazi
annexation of Austria and persecution of Jews
tighten like a noose around them in late 1938.
These three women are Bonyhady’s grandmother
Gretl, his great aunt Kathe, and Gretl’s daughter
Annelore, a teenager who nearly twenty years
later would be his mother, by then known by
her abbreviated anglicised name, Anne.
In the late 1990s, Bonyhady became
intrigued by the complex inter-linkages between
this consignment of art and his genealogy. The
art objects were a part of Bonyhady’s everyday
life, from his earliest childhood memories,
transported from a sumptuous apartment in
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The Gallia Collection sits crammed to the
ceiling in the small Cremorne apartment for over
thirty years, holding little commercial or cultural
value in Sydney’s then rudimentary arts scene.
This begins to change from the early 1970s as
Australia awakens to embrace multiculturalism and
there is hope of resurrection for the Collection. An
initial attempt by Kathe to donate the Klimt painting
Hermine to the Art Gallery of New South Wales to
repay Australia for its hospitality fails due to crass
provincialism. The painting is sold a little later by
Christie’s for a then world record price to end up in
the National Gallery in London. (In 2006 a looted
Klimt portrait, Adele Bloch-Bauer I, returned to
Maria Altmann, was auctioned by Christie’s for
$US135 million.) Bonyhady diplomatically refuses
to dwell on the sheer stupidity of elements of the
Australian arts establishment in the early 1970s.
But Anne is determined that the Collection should
remain in Australia and not return to Austria: after
the death of Gretl and Kathe she negotiates with
a more enlightened National Gallery of Victoria
for the acquisition of a considerable part of the
Collection of furniture, carpets, silver, ceramics,
glass, leatherwork, lace and jewelry. In 1976
it is acquired as a ‘job lot’ for AUS$25,000, a
fraction of its rapidly escalating market value.
Good Living Street is a captivating tour-deforce that can be read in many ways: the rapid rise
and fall of a small family dynasty and its important
arts collection; Austrian racism and the madness of
genocide; and Australian myopia and insularity. The
scholarship is based on extensive archival research
in Australia and Austria, an exhaustive search of
the literature (thoroughly documented), fieldwork in
Vienna and London, much material from personal
diaries, clever use of vibrant art history and theory,
and a profoundly moving family history based on
interview and the author’s personal experience.
Bonyhady deploys a genre of writing that
impressively and poetically weaves together art,
social and cultural histories and deeply reflexive
investigative family biography with a mesmerising,
galloping narrative – it is at once a book that is arts
educational and highly political and personal. With
such a lineage it is hardly surprising that the current
generation, Tim and his older brother Bruce, to
whom the book is dedicated, are seriously engaged
in the arts, philanthropy and issues of social justice.
I finished the book at once enlightened
yet deeply disturbed. While ultimately there is
a happy ending for much of the family’s arts
fortune, there is also a sad cost for dislocated
refugees, exacerbated by aspects of Australia’s
paranoid nationalism that remains all too
visible today. Its powerful engagement with
art as politics and the politics of art delivers
some powerful messages for the present: the
senselessness of prejudice and brutality and of
the conditional tolerance of foreigners who might
actually provide forms of material and cultural
capital that will greatly enrich the nation.
The physical form of the book is itself a work
of art, a sumptuous publication with a number of
plates in keeping with the philosophy of the Vienna
Workshop to produce the very best for a few (the
Workshop’s elitist motto was better to work ten days
to produce one product than to manufacture ten
products in a day). Yet the book’s very reasonable
price will ensure that it is widely available.
Perhaps paradoxically, after its hazardous
and long transcontinental journey, much of this
private family collection a century ago is now in
public ownership. From 18 June to 9 October 2011
the Gallia Collection will form a key part of the
National Gallery of Victoria’s blockbuster Vienna:
Art and Design. Good Living Street will not just
provide evocative reading for the exhibition, but
conversely the exhibition will enhance the book with
the visibility of the art that forms much of its subject.
And with deep symbolism bordering on sentience,
the matriarchal foundation and jewel in the crown
of the Collection, Klimt’s Hermine (1903/04), is
returning from London for a while, for a reunification
and perhaps to keep a watchful eye on proceedings.
Jon Altman is a research professor in anthropology at
the Australian National University. He wishes to disclose
that he is a friend of Tim Bonyhady.
P48: A colour plate of an illustration of Josef
Hoffman's design for Gretl's boudoir in the
Untere Augartenstrasse, 1915.
P49: 1/ Gustav Klimt, Portrait of Hermine Gallia,
1904, oil on canvas,170.5 x 96.5cm.
Collection: The National Gallery, London.
2/ A photo of the salon in the Gallia apartment, Venice.
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