Women of the Wiener Werkstätte
A major exhibition at MAK Vienna celebrates the many women artists and designers who contributed — almost always in the shadows — to the success of modernism
The Viennese School of Applied Arts was immediately open to girls since its establishment in 1863, although initially limiting them to floral and decorative painting.
In 1899, the revolutionary director Felician von Myrbach opened the entire spectrum of decorative arts to them, aided by the young instructors Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser, determined exponents of the “total work of art”. The resulting fertile collaborations saw many talented former students creating for the Wiener Werkstätte, an extraordinary cooperative of artisans active from 1903 to 1932, bringing a modernist taste to daily life in close synergy with enterprise.
However, apart from a few of these versatile, creative women — Gudrun Baudisch, Vally Wieselthierm, and Mathilde Flögl (an apt and director collaborator with Hoffmann and Moser) — most of them were soon forgotten. MAK Vienna rediscovers their fundamental contribution in an epochal exhibition, halted last year due to Covid: Women Artists of the Wiener Werkstätte, curated by Anne-Katrin Rossberg and Elisabeth Schmuttermeier.
Thorough research has led to the rediscovery of over 180 women artists, with 800 works mapping a chronology winding from the early forays in 1901 to those in the 1920s, when the lapidary, probabilist misogyny of Adolf Loos and Max Klinger overpowered the gains in women’s emancipation achieved since the Great War.
Women Artists of the Wiener Werkstätte
curated by Anne-Katrin Rossberg and Elisabeth Schmuttermeier
21 April – 3 October 2021
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