From Wiener Kunst im Hause to the Wiener Werkstätte

from Intumus: Interior Design Reader Edited by Mark Taylor and Juleanna Preston 2006 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Rebecca Houze

Rebecca Houze provides a historical account of the link between design fashion and marketing most profoundly asserted by the Wiener Werkstätte. While the success of the Secessionist campaign is attributed to the fact that it was directed towards the feminine, it inadvertently moulded the woman of the house as a spatial artist and conflated that role with the endorsement of visual imagery from botany, youth and organic forms. Ornament and decorative motifs evolving from such imagery became the trademark for interior design which was regarded as a form of dressing. In this text, Houze points to the tension between resisting and exploiting issues of fashion with regard to the emergence of modern style and places interior design at the centre of the tussle between art, craft and design.

In an introductory article published in the first issue of the Secession-influenced design journal, Das Interieur, editor and architect Josef Folsenics described a 'true Viennese interior.' Its most significant characteristic, he writes, is 'Gemütlichkeit,' a kind of cozy comfort. In the early nineteenth century, the gemütlich Viennese interior was epitomized by the Biedermeier style:

Artist and housewife were united in a single person. Just as the young beauty could spend hours alone in front of the mirror, in deep, naive, contemplation of aesthetic questions – which hairstyle, which posture best suited her – so had she also, gradually, according to her aesthetic experience, turned her home into the charming garment of her intimate life.¹

Modern architects such as Otto Wagner, and his students, Josef Hoffmann, Josef Olbrich, Josef Urban, and Otto Prutscher, embraced the Biedermeier style for its relatively simpler forms and clean lines, as well as for its association with a simpler domestic life. 'These men have outlined a new style,' Folsenics wrote, in the same article, 'and now women can return to their rightful role as interior designers.' Folsenics implied, however, that although women do possess an innate talent for home beautification, based on their intimate understanding of aesthetics through the perusal of their own beauty in the mirror, and of their talents in choosing their own wardrobes, they also possess the weakness to lose their aesthetic sensibility in times of artistic decline, specifically because

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of their tendency to follow fashion. Because of the recent infusion of artistic insight by (male) Secessionist designers, women, he believed, could once again make use of their decorating talents. This new style, in fact, Folsenics wrote, 'is much like a Viennese woman,' curvy and sensuous, yet intimate and ultimately more domestic than urban or cosmopolitan.² Folsenics's introduction reveals his strong ambivalence toward women, who, on the one hand, served as models of domestic artfulness yet, on the other, were incapable of true innovation, which must be accomplished by men. Wiener Kunst im Hause provided an interesting antidote to this conservative point of view, presenting interiors that were not only designed by women, but that creatively inspired the work of male teachers at the Kunstgewerbeschule. Wiener Kunst im Hause provided a new model for reconciling modern art and commerce, the domestic and the urbane.³

In 1900, an exhibition of student work from the Kunstgewerbeschule was sent to the Paris Exhibition. Works by talented female students, Else Unger and Gisela von Falke among others, were presented in a room designed by Josef Hoffmann. The decorative objects were displayed as if arranged in a private home, rather than for sale in a department store, or as permanent exhibits of an art museum. English art critic Gabriel Mourey wrote that the Kunstgewerbeschule, led by Josef Hoffmann, had presented the 'only truly modern and national style' at the Paris Exhibition. He attributed the successful fresh and cohesive quality of the designs to the school's rejection of all past and foreign influences, and to their peculiar mode of exhibiting complete 'interiors' rather than individual works.⁴

One of the favorite objects at the exhibition was a secretary desk designed by Else Unger in a carved wooden hydrangea motif.⁵ This piece utilized the curvilinearity and botanical patterns that had come to be associated with the modern movement in Vienna, and with 'secessionist style' in particular. Vienna art critic Ludwig Hevesi described the feel of the new work as fresh and alive in contrast to the static, more historically based works of just a few years before. 'The motifs are taken from less frequently tread areas of botany,' he wrote. 'The plants are seen with freer eyes and depicted in a fresh, ornamental mood.'⁶ This new era of modern art was exemplified by the work of the young, female designers.

This preoccupation with fresh new life was closely related to the artistic program of the Vienna Secession, which proclaimed youth, growth, and organic rejuvenation with their motto, 'Ver Sacrum,' (Sacred Spring), and with their visual imagery.⁷ (… p 6)

The most striking aspect of the room at the Paris Exhibition was its use of oversized ornamental motifs in appliqué textiles. The traditional appliqué embroidery technique of embellishing furniture coverings, cushions, upholstery, and drapery, by stitching cut pieces of cloth onto a cloth background, was extended to cover the walls as well. The modern Viennese interiors displayed at the Paris Exhibition of 1900 revealed a growing

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interest in the use of textiles and traditional handwork not only as decorative objects to be incorporated into designed rooms, but as models for the organic, flexible dressing of an interior space. This application of textile 'dressings' to the walls of the pavilion directly relates to the German architect Gottfried Semper's influential 'Bekleidungsprinzip' (Principle of Dress), which was of theoretical significance to Otto Wagner and his students, including Josef Hoffmann. According to Semper, the textile arts represented the earliest form of man's art-making tendency, which would evolve into architecture. Woven mats, for example, which were originally hung to divide the space of a room, eventually became structural walls, which retained the woven texture of fiber in new materials, such as brick or stone.⁸ Because textile arts such as lace, tapestry, and embroidery represented the seeds of artistic creativity, they took on a central role in programs for the reform of applied arts institutionalized at the Oesterreichisches Museum under the advice of Semper, who brought his ideas to Vienna in 1864. (… p 7)

When the first Wiener Werkstätte showrooms opened in 1904, they adopted the model of the well-furnished home, which had been used by Wiener Kunst im Hause. These spaces included soft carpets and armchairs, upholstered in artistic textiles, for customers to relax in while gazing at the elegant glass cabinets displaying modern silver and porcelain wares. Walls were decorated with chic fashion illustrations. Ladies trying on clothing could walk around the shop barefoot comfortably on the soft, felt-covered floors. The stylishly outfitted interiors of the shop encouraged customers, such as Fredericke Maria Beer and Sonja Knips, wealthy patrons of the Secession, to mentally design their own aesthetically coordinated homes, furnished with products ranging from draperies, upholstery fabrics, and carpets to dishes, light fixtures, silverware, and shoes. Beer and Knips both had their portraits painted by Gustav Klimt, and commissioned apartments designed by Josef Hoffmann and outfitted by the Wiener Werkstätte. These patrons enacted the turn-of-the-century 'Gesamtkunstwerk,' in which the domestic living space became a theater of modern life. All spatial and visual elements including the structure of a building, its interior and furnishings, and the costume of its inhabitants were conceived as a single aesthetic statement. The best-known example of the secessionist Gesamtkunstwerk is Josef Hoffmann's mansion for the Stoclet family in Brussels, built between 1905 and 1911. The sumptuous dining and music rooms of the Palais Stoclet exemplified the theatrical spaces of the Gesamtkunstwerk, celebrating sight, sound, and taste in a symphony of sensual harmonies that paralleled the operas of Richard Wagner, from whom the concept originated. In his designs for the Palais Stoclet, Hoffmann was particularly attuned to fashion and to the Viennese identity of the new style of interior, even designing a dress for Madame Stoclet so that she would not clash with her living room décor as she had while wearing a French Paul Poiret gown.

The relationship between fashion and architecture in Vienna is well-documented, and has been of particular interest to scholars of the past decade whose work typically has focused

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on Adolf Loos.⁹ Loos wrote a great deal about fashion, and was himself preoccupied with clothing in such a way that the concept of dress constantly informed his architectural designs. Loos’s belief that understated dress was the most appropriate disguise for modern man extended to the stark, unconventional facades of his shops and private residences. The subtleties of Loos’s interiors, however, reflect his more complicated understanding of architectural space as a garment that allows its inhabitants to psychologically negotiate their place in modern life. Loos’s interiors simultaneously, as George Simmel suggests, allow one to display one’s individuality, while assuming a degree of anonymity; they are both public and private; and domestic and urban.¹⁰ Although Loos was extremely hostile towards the Secession and the Wiener Werkstätte, especially for the latter’s reliance on excessive ornamentation, his understanding of the interior as a form of dress was quite similar to Josef Hoffmann’s, and grew out of the same architectural theories of cladding introduced by Gottfried Semper in the mid-nineteenth century, and further developed by Otto Wagner in the early twentieth.

In his essay, ‘The Principle of Cladding,’ Loos, repeating Semper’s theory, writes:

The architect’s general task is to provide a warm and livable space. Carpets are warm and livable. He decides for this reason to spread out one carpet on the floor and to hang up four to form the walls. But you cannot build a house out of carpets. Both the carpet on the floor and the tapestry on the wall require a structural frame to hold them in the correct place. To invent his frame is the architect’s second task.¹¹

Just as Josef Folsenics called for a ‘gemütlich’ Viennese interior, Loos desired a ‘warm and livable’ interior space. This interior must be comforting and sensual, allowing the viewer or inhabitant to respond to it physically and psychologically. The interior also is a private, domestic, feminine space – a space for intimate conversation, sexual relations, and reproduction. It is a protective refuge from the public space of the modern city, yet it also mediates between the two realms. Different rooms served different purposes; while bedrooms were considered the most intimate and feminine spaces of a private residence, the social space of the dining room and the intellectual space of the library were coded masculine. The salon functioned as a space in which women would socialize while dressed in more relaxed and intimate garments, hovering on the boundary between public and private.

The Wiener Werkstätte’s fashionability was the secret of its success. The close relationship between a specifically feminine dressing up in fancy clothes and dressing up the home in a splendid garment had its roots in the national Austrian decorative arts institutions, which fostered and promoted women’s traditional textile arts, and recognized women’s traditional role in home decoration.

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Around 1908, Wiener Mode began to feature embroidery and textile designs for comprehensive room decorations on the back covers of the magazines. By this time, the Wiener Werkstätte was well established, and the room designs in Wiener Mode reflected the modern aesthetic in their choice of colorful or black and white geometric motifs. On the one hand, the popular interior designs in Wiener Mode, which usually were not attributed to a specific designer or design workshop, may be seen as a dilution of the modernist secession style of the Wiener Werkstätte. On the other hand, they cannot simply be understood as the last step in the decline of artistic idea to popular culture. Rather, the popular fashion magazine as a vehicle for perpetuating both commerce and culture already was well in place by the time the Secessionists began to market their new designs through the Wiener Werkstätte. Designers including Josef Hoffmann, Kolo Moser, and their students at the Kunstgewerbeschule responded to this mechanism as much as it responded to them. The design of artistic interiors and furnishings, and the marketing of fashionable goods, must be seen, rather, as a complementary process that allowed both ends to fuel one another creatively.

The modernist interest in textile arts and interior design in Vienna would not have emerged and blossomed as it did had it not been for the constant driving force of fashion, which provided a space for women to engage physically, either as designers or consumers, with the aestheticization of themselves and their living spaces through cloth and needlework. A domestic comfort was recovered in Vienna at the turn of the century by physically wrapping living spaces in pieces of embroidered cloth. The garment – especially the feminine garment – was a common metaphor for the interior living space at the turn of the century. It is important to recognize, however, that this form of feminine dress had as much to do with the idea of ‘cladding’ a space in cloth – a flexible, organic, fiber material – as it did with a particular style or fashion of clothing. Cloth itself has a long history of associations with the feminine, and as Semper interprets it, with our inherent creative tendencies. The textile-based style of interior decoration promoted by Wiener Kunst im Hause and perpetuated by the Wiener Werkstätte was derived from women’s traditional handcrafts, which the Secessionists admired, imitated, relied upon, and fostered in their educational programs, publications, and exhibitions. (… p 21)

Notes

1 ‘Künstler und Hausfrau waren in einer Person vereinigt. So wie die junge Schöne, wenn sie allein war, stundenlang vor dem Spiegel stehen konnte, um in naiver Vertiefung in ästhetische Fragen herauszubekommen, welche Frisur, welche Haltung, welche Bewegungsform ihr am besten steht, so hat sie auch auf dem Wege erfahrungsgemässer Aesthetik allmälig ihr Heim zum reizenden Kleide ihr es intimen Lebens ausgestaltet,’ Josef Folsenics, ‘Das Wiener Interieur’, Das Interieur I, 1900, pp 3–6.

2 ‘Wer den Typus der echten Wienerin kennt, der weiss, dass im Glanze feuriger Augen, im Rosenschimmer blühender Wangen, in den wichen Wellenlinien des lachenden Mundes eine Seele schlummert, die mit der Innigkeit und Natürlichkeit ihres Empfindens allen Sinnenreiz der äusseren Erscheinung wie mit einem warmen milden Lichte überstrahlt. Diese persönliche Eigenart hatte stets die Tendenz, sich auf das ganze Leben zu übertragen, auf den gesellschaftlichen Verkehr, auf die

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öffentlichen Vergnügungen und vor Allem auf das Familienleben und das echte Wiener Interieur,' Josef Folsenics, 'Das Wiener Interieur', Das Interieur 1, 1900, p 6.

3 Christopher Long, in his article, 'Wiener Wohnkultur: Interior Design in Vienna, 1910–1938', Studies in the Decorative Arts, Fall/Winter 1997–1998, pp 29–51, discusses the Viennese emphasis on domestic comfort, 'Gemütlichkeit,' in the years between the wars as a reaction against the unified, hard-edged, functionalist style championed by the Bauhaus, as well as by Josef Hoffmann and the Wiener Werkstätte. Although the Wiener Werkstätte did embrace a model of interior design based upon unified rectilinear forms, I believe that the workshop's general interest in domestic design, stemmed from the same Viennese desire for Gemütlichkeit that Long suggests was at the root of the more popular and eclectic designs by Oskar Strnad and Josef Frank between the world wars.

4 Gabriel Mourey, 'Round the Exhibition-IV. Austrian Decorative Art', The Studio XXI, Oct 1900–Jan 1901, pp 112–13.

5 Ludwig Hevesi, 'Die Kunstgewerbeschule auf der Pariser Weltausstellung', Kunst und Kunsthandwerk III, 1900, p 117.

6 'In anderen aber ist der neue Stil schon lebendig. Die Motive warden aus weniger zertretenen Theilen der Botanik geholt, die Pflanzen mit freierem Auge angesehen und mit einer frischeren ornamentalen Laune verwendet,' Ludwig Hevesi, 'Die Kunstgewerbeschule auf der Pariser Weltausstellung', p 121.

7 By choosing the title 'Ver Sacrum' for their periodical, the Secessionists not only evoked the sacred rebirth of the world in springtime, but also recalled a Roman ritual in which the elders pledged their children to save society in times of national danger. By 'seceding' from the exhibiting society of the Academy of Fine Arts, the young artists pledged themselves to save culture from their elders. Their own Secession was based on the Roman model of the secessio plebis, in which the plebs defiantly withdrew from the republic, rejecting the misrule of the patricians. See Carl E Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture [1961], Vintage Books (New York), 1981, pp 214–15.

8 Gottfried Semper, Der Stil in technischen und tektonischen Künsten, oder Praktische Aesthetik. Ein Handbuch für Techniker, Künstler und Kunstfreunde. Band I. Die Textile Kunst, Verlag für Kunst und Wissenschaft (Frankfurt am Main), 1860–63.

9 Examples of recent work on Loos's relationship to fashion include: Janet Stewart, Fashioning Vienna: Adolf Loos's Cultural Criticism, Routledge (London and New York), 2000; Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity; Modern Architecture as Mass Media, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA and London), 1994; Mary MacLeod, 'Undressing Architecture: Fashion, Gender, and Modernity', Deborah Fausch, et al, (eds.), Architecture: In Fashion, Princeton Architectural Press (Princeton), 1994, p 38–123, and Mark Wigley, 'White Out: Fashioning the Modern', Deborah Fausch, Architecture: In Fashion, 1994.

10 The German sociologist Georg Simmel makes this point, for example, in his 1904 essay 'Fashion' in Donald N Levine (ed), On Individuality and Social Forms, The University of Chicago Press (Chicago and London), 1971, pp 294–323.

11 Adolf Loos, 'The Principle of Cladding', Spoken into the Void: Collected Essays 1897–1900, trans Jane O Newman and John H Smith, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA and London), 1982, pp 66–9. This passage also is quoted and remarked upon in Beatriz Colomina, 'Intimacy and Spectacle: The Interiors of Adolf Loos', AA files, 20, Autumn 1990, pp 5–15.

Rebecca Houze, 'From Wiener Kunst im Hause to the Wiener Werkstätte: Marketing Domesticity with Fashionable Interior Design', Design Issues, vol 18 no 1, Winter 2002, pp 3–23.

(Excerpts pp 4–23)

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