Katrin Pirner studied art history in Vienna (University of Vienna) and Paris (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne). As part of a cotutelle de thèse, she is currently working on her doctorate at the Universities of Basel and Vienna. She is a prae doc assistant at the Department of Art History of the University of Vienna. She has been a member of the eikones Graduate School since fall 2024.

Decorative painting around 1900. With case studies on Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard (working title)

My dissertation project focuses on painted decorations by Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard that were commissioned for private interiors. In the context of these case studies, I reflect on the tension-filled adaptation and transformation of decorative painting with its aristocratic connotations for late bourgeois interiors as places of production and reception of art, its relationship to domestic and subject cultures and to contemporary conditions of production. Instead of following the ideal of non-commercial, site-specific wall painting often proclaimed during the Third French Republic, the panneaux décoratifs were mobile and ultimately ephemeral as decorations. Nevertheless, they were created in relation to the respective specific interior as a complex material and social space and formed surfaces for reflection and projection when they were activated by their viewers from their position in the background.