Wiener Werkstätte - A breeding ground for modernism
Wiener Werkstätte - A breeding ground for modernism
The Wiener Werkstätte played a key role in shaping modern design during the early 20th century. This article looks at its origins, its influence on movements like Art Deco and Bauhaus, and its impact on Swedish design through figures like Josef Frank and Carl Bergsten.
At the Millesgården Museum in Lidingö, the fascinating and vital exhibition ‘Wiener Werkstäte 1903-1932’ is currently being shown. The exhibition, a cooperation between Millegården and MAK (Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna), generously displays the work of artists, architects, designers, and craftsmen associated with the Wiener Werkstätte. The show is a tribute to one of the most influential and creative movements in early 20th century Europe, states Millesgården museum director Sara Källström in the exhibition catalog.
Around 1900, Vienna was a cultural melting pot. Poets, artists, writers, and musicians gathered in the city's many cafés. It was here the breeding ground for the development of European modernism was created. A prerequisite for the modern style to arise in Vienna was the formation of the Vienna Secession in 1897, an exhibition hall for a group of artists with their motto “To every age its art, to every art its freedom.” The group’s program statement was to distance oneself from history in favor of the future.
At the end of the 19th century, the so-called Arts & Crafts movement in England received much attention, as did the works of the Scottish architect Charles Rennie Macintosh (1868-1928) some years later. The Arts & Crafts movement program advocated for artists to collaborate with the manufacturing industry to make beautiful and useful fabrics, furniture, and housewares for a wider group of people. This program strongly influenced the architect Josef Hoffmann (1870-1956) and the artist Koloman Moser (1868-1918), both active teachers at the Austrian Museum’s School of Arts and Crafts in Vienna. This led to them and the textile manufacturer Fritz Waerendorfer (1868-1939) founding the Wiener Werkstätte, with Arts & Crafts as a model.
The Wiener Werkstätte became a cooperative workshop for artists and craftsmen who created high-quality, functional, as well as aesthetically pleasing objects. This workshop quickly became an institution in Vienna. Their comprehensive artistic approach contributed to the notion of the universal work of art, where everything in the home should be imbued with artistic quality; from architecture and interior design, to clothes and tableware. The workshop’s vision was to inspire people to change for the better by surrounding them with beauty.
For almost three decades (1903-1932), Wiener Werkstätte symbolized the latest Vienna style. Their radically geometrical concepts became a forerunner for both the European Art Deco style and the German Bauhaus movement. Their idea of eliminating the barriers between arts and crafts was to become central to the early 20th-century architecture and design development.
The Austrian-Swedish Josef Frank (1885-1967) started his architectural studies in Vienna the same year the Wiener Werkstätte was founded. One of his teachers, Josef Hoffmann, encouraged Frank in his studies and later mediated contact with clients. Although they shared the same ground, Frank came to develop a view of interior design that differed from Wiener Werkstätte’s. He did not follow the principle of designing all furniture in the same style; he rather advocated the idea of interiors composed of furniture in different styles and materials, which he later named accidentism.
When Josef Frank in the early 1930s moved to Sweden, he met Estrid Ericsson, the founder of the interior company Svenskt Tenn. Their respectful and long-term collaboration has resulted in one of the most valuable interior design ranges ever developed in Sweden. Frank’s collection of furniture, lamps, and textiles can truly be considered a universal work of art in its own right. Frank’s works are currently on display in the anniversary exhibition ´Svenskt Tenn—a Philosophy of Home’ at Liljevalchs Art Gallery in Stockholm.
The Wiener Werkstätte also inspired other Swedish architects and designers during the 20th-century. Carl Bergsten (1879-1935), one of the most prominent Swedish architects, visited Vienna in the early 1900s. Bergsten’s Strömsholmen chair, designed in 1906, is clearly inspired by Josef Hoffmann and the Wiener Werkstätte. Much later, the architect Olle Anderson (b.1939) made his tribute to Koloman Moser while designing his masterpiece Little Mama cabinet in 1981. The cabinet’s strictly geometric shape and subtle decoration makes it a modern interpretation of the Vienna style.
Written by Lars Bülow
