Wiener Werkstätten

via IIID, 9 months ago

Productive Cooperative of Artisans in Vienna

In 1903, the artists Josef Hoffman and Koloman Moser established the “Wiener Werkstätte” together with the banker Fritz Wärndorfer. This marked the foundation of an institution which “became the educator of the entire civilised world through exemplary noble work and exquisite taste, and raised the best of Viennese nature to real international significance”.

The Wiener Werkstätte, internationally the unequalled climax of arts & crafts in the 20th century, with a lasting effect to the present day through its amazingly modern approach, was entered into the commercial register as “Productive Cooperative of Artisans in Vienna”.

Its object was to reunite function and form in a time of inferior mass production and mindless imitation of bygone styles. The technical means for achieving this, was excellent craftsmanship. “Our strength shall lie in good proportions and deft treatment of materials”, as Hoffman and Moser put it in the work programme published in 1905.

The idea of art pervading all spheres of life had already been made an issue within the Wiener Secession movement in the fin de siécle period.

To the Wiener Werkstätte, no object was trivial enough for not being designed or refined by artists and artisans. In addition to the activity of the construction office affiliated with the Wiener Werkstätte, the art community designed and manufactured furniture, tableware, cutlery, jewellery, enamel work, book covers, tapestry and various stationary goods. But the range also included art postcards and fashion in all its manifestations.

Apart from a great number of free-lancers and regular contributors like Gustav Klimt, with regard to the Palais Stoclet in Brussels by the architect Josef Hoffmann, Oskar Kokoschka, whose book “Die träumenden Knaben” was published by the Wiener Werkstätte in 1908, and Egon Schiele, who designed postcards, it was notably Carl Otto Czeschka (silverwork and textiles), Bertold Löffler, Michael Powolny and Vally Wieselthier (ceramics), Eduard Wimmer-Wisgrill and Max Snischek (fashion) who shaped the image of the Wiener Werkstätte.

As a result of the hard post-World-War-I period and an undeniable decay of style, the Wiener Werkstätte was closed down in 1932.