In France and Belgium, artists and designers embraced a more naturalistic, decorative style known as art nouveau.1 In England, the arts and crafts movement developed around John Ruskin's ideas and was led by artist/designer/craftsman William Morris. In Germany and Austria, the young artists chose the term Jugendstil ('youth style'), after the illustrated magazine Jugend, to describe their work. Although these movements claimed to break from historical modes, in fact they drew on romanticised notions of past eras; for example, Ruskin and Morris championed an idealised version of the middle ages. Many designers also looked towards the East, particularly Japan, as they explored a pared-down aesthetic with abstracted forms from nature.
In Vienna, designers including Josef Hoffmann (1870-1956), rejected the organically rendered, flowing lines characteristic of art nouveau and Jugendstil. For the most part, Viennese designers favoured a restrained geometry and scaled-down decorative elements. Their aesthetic appealed to sophisticated clients, who were eager to elevate their status as cultured elite. The first break with the Viennese art establishment, the künstlerhaus (Artists' House), occurred in 1897, when Hoffmann, Koloman Moser (1868-1918), Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) and others founded the Vienna Secession. The secessionists elected Klimt as their president and organised exhibits, many designed by Hoffmann and Moser, and began to cultivate patronage.
Hoffmann pursued a 'total work of art' (gesamtkunstwerk), in which every aspect of life was designed to reflect avant-garde tastes. In 1903, he and Moser, with businessman/collector Fritz Waerndorfer - a patron of the Secession - founded an artist collaborative, the Wiener Werkstätte, to create products for clients who shared their vision. Two years later, in June 1905, the Secession disbanded.
The workshop's employees made an extensive range of furniture and decorative objects, proving the viability in aesthetic terms of Hoffmann's gesamtkunstwerk. Merely one aspect of the workshop's line, Wiener Werkstätte jewellery is symbolic of the firm's achievements. To showcase this aspect, the Neue Galerie Museum for German and Austrian Art in New York City has staged a small but elegant display of more than 40 pieces made between 1903 and 1920. (The firm closed in 1930.) Those who visit the museum prior to 30 June will have access to a large body of Klimt's works from the Ronald S. Lauder and Serge Sabarsky collections. The two shows work interactively, as Klimt was a guiding light for the workshop, as well as a patron.
With eight paintings and more than 120 drawings, the Klimt show is the first museum retrospective of his work in the States. Klimt's paintings are, of course, dazzling, and the drawings reveal a good deal of the artist's sensual style; however the Neue Galerie curators have added features that make viewing the exhibit a special experience: personal letters, vintage photographs, cufflinks and a seal designed for the artist by Hoffmann, and the last known extant example of the blue painting smock favoured by Klimt.
In one gallery space, the curators have recreated the receiving room from Klimt's studio at Josefstädter Strasse 21 in Vienna, occupied by him from 1892 until summer 1912. Based on floor plans and a c.1912 photo, the interior contains original Hoffmann-designed and workshop-produced furnishings. After viewing these treasures, visitors can travel to the lower level for a display of children's drawings by students now living in Vienna titled 'Adele Comes to America'. These drawings were made in response to the history behind one of Klimt's most famous paintings, 'Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer' (1907). The painting, purchased in June 2006 by Neue Galerie president Ronald S. Lauder for US$135 million, now hangs above a mantlepiece in the museum. The price paid is a record for any painting to date.2
'Wiener Werkstätte Jewelry' offers finished pieces made from designs by Hoffmann, Moser, Carl Otto Czeschka (1878-1960), Dagobert Pech (1887-1923), who ran the firm from 1910 to 1923, and Eduard Josef Wimmer-Wisgrill (1882-1961). Encased in seven four-sided cases in one gallery space, the jewellery is accompanied by design sketches and labelling text. Enlarged black-and-white period photos of Klimt's close companion, Emilie Flöge, hang on the surrounding walls. In these images, the fashion designer/businesswoman, who owned a dress shop with her two sisters, wears 'reform' outfits from her shop, accented with jewellery purchased from the workshop by her or given as a gift by Klimt.
One photo shown at the Neue Galerie is a view of the central hall of the Eighth Secession exhibition in Vienna (3 November to 27 December 1900), as reproduced in a 1901 issue of the The Studio. The Secessionists sought to bring together the finest modern Viennese art and design with examples of high-quality contemporary European decorative arts. Scottish architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928) and his associates, known as the 'Glasgow Four' participated by creating a total aesthetic environment. After the event, Hoffmann and some of his colleagues identified Mackintosh as a kindred spirit.3 English designer Charles Robert Ashbee (1863-1942), founder of the Guild of Handicraft, exhibited there as well. Ashbee had social and political objectives that, he felt, could be achieved through arts and crafts production. While Hoffmann brought skilled craftsmen to his workshop, Ashbee trained many guild workers. In her essay for the exhibition catalogue, Neue Galerie assistant curator Janis Staggs points out Ashbee's intention of elevating the worker, allowing him self-direction and a share in profits. Ashbee drew his socialist ethic from William Morris.4
It is tempting to apply such utopian ideals to the Wiener Werkstätte, but for its founders 'Art' itself was given primary place, with no distinction between fine and applied arts. For Ashbee, the worker stood in centre. Nevertheless, Hoffmann and his colleagues considered artist, designer and craftsman as equals. The workshop established a system of makers' marks for the designers and craftsmen and permitted craftsmen an impressive amount of freedom to interpret the designers' sketches based on a personal understanding of mutual intentions.
The exhibition catalogue text fills in most pertinent background details, with an overview of Wiener Werkstätte history, the main designers, characteristics of their aesthetic, and some of the patrons who embraced the workshop's ideals. The expertly stocked Neue Galerie bookshop contains many other studies of the times and artists that impart a greater sense of the excitement that swirled through Vienna during the period.5 The buyer for the shop is, evidently, quite skilled at choosing unusual selections. Readers of fiction can pick up Elizabeth Hickey's historical novel The Painted Kiss (Washington Square Press, 2006) in which the author imaginatively describes the intriguing relationship between artist, Klimt, and muse, Flöge. In reality, Klimt met Flöge in 1891 when she was 17, he twelve years older, and his brother was about to wed one of her sisters. In Hickey's tale, at age 12 Emilie is sent by her wealthy parents to study drawing with a penniless Klimt.
For a touch of beautifully illustrated whimsy, there are two children's picture books for sale in the shop: Adorable Adele by Peter Stephan Jungk, illustrated by John Martinez (Neue Galerie, 2007) starring Klimt model Adele Bloch-Bauer, and Klimt and his Cat by Bérénice Capatti, illustrated by Octavia Monaco (Eerdmans, 2005).
Highlights of the exhibition catalogue include: reproductions of the makers' marks and monograms as reproduced in a guide to the Arbeitsprogram (Working Program) from 1905; pages from articles on the workshop published in Deutsche Kunst un Dekoration; colour sketches made by the designers; and, in many cases, indications of prices paid for individual pieces and the names of patrons who acquired them. Numerous period photographs show society women who supported the workshop wearing purchases. One photo from 1908, taken at the Kunstchau in Vienna, has a group of women (with Moser's wife, Editha, and arts journalist/salon hostess/modern art promoter Berta Zuckerkandl) around a table selling items to raise funds for the firm. Here, the extent to which 'total work of art' could be applied stretches far, for Czeschka and Moser designed the gingerbread sold at the booth.
Opened in fall 2001, the Neue Galerie is the result of a 30-year friendship between dealer/businessman Serge Sabarsky (1912-96) and collector Ronald S. Lauder (chairman of the international cosmetics firm Estee Lauder). Born in Vienna, Sabarsky fled to New York in 1939 under pressure from the Gestapo. After the war, he worked as an architectural designer. Although he did not begin to collect as early in life as Lauder - who purchased his first drawing, an expressionist work by Egon Schiele, in his teens with money from his bar mitzvah - by the 1950s Sabarsky had acquired works by Schiele, Klimt, Max Beckmann, Ernst Kirchner, Otto Dix and Oskar Kokoschka. In 1968, he opened a gallery dedicated to German and Austrian expressionism on Madison Avenue. At that time, Lauder and his brother made their first purchase from Sabarsky. Along with their love of German and Austrian expressionism, Sabarsky and Lauder shared a commitment to public art display. From 1985, Sabarsky organised shows at major institutions. In the early 1990s, he opened the Egon Schiele Center in Cesky, Krumlov, the Czech Republic, where Lauder serves as president. Also in 1985, Sabarsky purchased the land-marked five-storey building on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue, constructed in 1914, that houses the Neue Galerie.6
A magnet for European tourists who comb the city's museums and galleries, Sabarsky and Lauder's museum has been described by critics as a 'jewel box'. With two gallery floors, exhibits are necessarily small, but the art works on view are, generally, the finest examples of their kind, reflecting Sabarsky's and Lauder's discerning eyes and tastes. Given the treasures within the gallery spaces, one may wonder that the longest lines on most days are for seats at Café Sabarsky, one of two restaurants operating on the premises. In fact, the café recreates a fin-de-siècle Viennese coffee house, complete with Bavarian sausages, potato salad, spatzle, strudel and linzertorte. The café decor is museum-quality: lighting by Josef Hoffman, furniture by Adolf Loos and banquettes upholstered with a fabric by Otto Wagner from 1912. A grand piano stands in one corner, used for frequent cabaret, chamber and classical music performances.
The Neue Galerie continues a qualitative tradition reaching back to the Vienna Secession and the Wiener Werkstätte. At one point in the workshop's history, the firm maintained shops in Paris, Zurich and New York. It seems, though, that its success would inevitably falter as the social, political and economic situation at home and abroad changed. Strong on ideals, Hoffmann and his colleagues refused to compromise materials or quality. Handcrafted objects take time, cost money and do not lend themselves to mass production. The fate of one of the firm's founders, Waerndorfer, is a cautionary tale. Staggs explains in the catalogue, 'Fritz would continue his passionate support of the Wiener Werkstätte to the point of financial ruin. Bankrupted by his investment in the firm, he was forced by his family to emigrate to the United States in March 1914'.
Even so, the firm's productions are a great and lasting achievement. While very much products of the ideas and ideals circulating in Vienna at the turn of the century, the designs transcend time and place, are intrinsically modern, extremely sophisticated and truly luxurious. That the designers achieved this with silver and semi-precious stones, understated decoration, exquisite tension between curved and linear elements, and limited use of gold astounds the intellect. More importantly, the finished pieces astound the senses. Taking Freud's views to heart, the workshop's designers created wares with a restrained and refined sensuality that is more exciting than any overt display.
Cindi Di Marzo
Notes
1. The term 'Art Nouveau' derived from dealer Siegfried Bing's gallery, l'Art Nouveau, opened in 1895 in Paris.
2. A wealthy Jewish industrialist, Adele Bloch-Bauer's husband, Ferdinand, fled from the Nazis at the end of the 1930s. Subsequently, they seized the family's paintings and most of their other possessions, including a castle in Bohemia. After more than 60 years, the Austrian government returned the painting to the the Bloch estate. Adele was the only model Klimt painted more than once. She also modelled for 'Adele Bloch-Bauer II' (1912).
3. The Glasgow Four were: Mackintosh; his wife; Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, Margaret's sister, Frances Macdonald MacNair; and Frances's husband, J. Herbert MacNair. The Four met in the mid 1890s while studying at the Glasgow School of Art. Influences of many turn-of-the-century and early modern styles (arts and crafts, art nouveau, art deco) appear in their designs, as do traditional Japanese and Celtic motifs.
4. Wiener Werkstätte Jewelry, edited by Janis S. Staggs with contributions by Ronald S. Lauder and Neue Galerie director Renée Price (Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2008), p. 22.
5. For example, Wiener Werkstätte: 1903-1932 by Gabriele Fahr-Becker (Taschen, 2008 edition); Wiener Werkstätte: Design in Vienna by Christian Brandstätter (Abrams, 2003); Viennese Design and the Wiener Werkstätte by Jane Kallir (Braziller, 1986); and two catalogues from the Neue Galerie, Josef Hoffmann Interiors, 1902-1913, edited by Christian Witt-Dörring, curator at the Neue Galerie (Prestel, 2006), and Dagobert Peche and the Wiener Werkstätte, edited by Peter Noever (Yale University Press, 2002).
6. The Neue Galerie claims roots in art institutions founded during the early years of the 20th century to promote European modernism; for example, the Neue Galerie in Vienna, opened by Otto Kallir in 1923. This gallery closed in 1939 due to threats from the Nazis, but Kallir went to New York, opened his Galerie St. Etienne and introduced Americans to Austrian expressionism.
