Working simply exterior of Vienna’s historic centre a century in the past, the Wiener Werkstätte aspired to handcraft lovely objects for Twentieth-century residing. Lively between 1903 and 1932, and based by members of the Vienna Secession motion, this collective of artists and craftspeople introduced artistic freedom to utilitarian objects comparable to furnishings, textiles, jewelry, toys and ceramics. Different European actions of the time, such because the German Bauhaus faculty, shared this aim however strove in the direction of mass manufacturing; the Wiener Werkstätte championed the human contact.
In some methods, the group’s ethos resonates with the rapid-fire technological developments of our present second. “This was a gaggle of artists and designers who had been anxious about how industrialisation and machines had been impacting society, high quality of life and the worth of expertise,” says Kristina Parsons, the curator of a brand new exhibition in regards to the workshop on the Jewish Museum in New York. “In response, the Wiener Werkstätte sought to convey artwork to the on a regular basis features of recent life.”
The textile designer Felice Rix-Ueno’s plain-weave silk print Tarantella (1929) might be on view © MAK/Branislav Djordjevic
As this lesser-known collective has begun regaining consideration lately, its feminine artists are getting a better look. The Museum of Utilized Arts in Vienna hosted an exhibition on the ladies of the Wiener Werkstätte in 2021, which impressed New York’s Jewish Museum to provide another model, opening in July. 1 / 4 of the roughly 200 girls artists who labored with the guild had been of Jewish descent, and they’re the main focus of an exhibition of greater than 200 objects in varied mediums, titled Modernity and Opulence: Ladies of the Wiener Werkstätte.
Makers and patrons
Of the 30 artists included in Modernity and Opulence, works by the ceramic artist Vally Wieselthier and the textile designer Felice Rix-Ueno are being given specific emphasis. The museum can also be drawing from its personal collections, which embody a number of Jewish New Yr greeting playing cards adorned with Wiener Werkstätte textiles. One exhibition part will spotlight the group’s fashions, regularly immortalised in photographic and painted portraits of the period; one other will characteristic the community of Jewish girls who had been energetic patrons of the Wiener Werkstätte, a aspect explored by the Jewish Museum curatorial crew. This contains the socialite and artwork patron Adele Bloch-Bauer (famously painted by Gustav Klimt), the journalist Berta Zuckerkandl, the artist Broncia Koller-Pinell, the gallerist Friederike Maria Beer-Monti and the ladies’s rights advocate Magda Mautner von Markhof.
One other group of Wiener Werkstätte girls that Modernity and Opulence is hoping to convey consideration to is those that labored with the collective and had been later killed within the Holocaust or whose fates stay unknown. One such artist is Grete Neuwalder, who was killed, though a few of her clay work survives. (It was believed to have been hidden in a Viennese chocolate store and later shipped to the artist’s surviving household in New York.) A booklet accompanying the exhibition will embody Neuwalder’s story together with the names of different Jewish girls artists of the Wiener Werkstätte, in an effort to encourage future analysis.
“It’s my hope that this exhibition might be an necessary platform to rediscover and reintroduce many once-known artists into our histories,” Parsons says, “in order that they’re celebrated and remembered.”
• Modernity and Opulence: Ladies of the Wiener Werkstätte, Jewish Museum, New York, 17 July-15 November
