Modernity and Opulence
Women of the Wiener Werkstätte
Vienna, 1900. What a magical era in design history: fresh, inspiring, and endlessly beautiful. In his memoir, the Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig famously called it the “Golden Age of Security” — cultured, cosmopolitan, stable, and the birthplace of avant-garde art and architecture, music, psychology, philosophy. Upon this fertile ground, Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser founded the Wiener Werkstätte, a firm that would become the cradle of modern design. What we learn from the newly opened exhibition Modernity and Opulence: Women of the Wiener Werkstätte, at the Jewish Museum, is that the Workshops were far from a male-only venture, and that women — artists, designers, patrons, and tastemakers — were not merely present but central to its success, its visual identity, and its execution. While past scholarship has emphasized the role of its dynamic founders, Hoffmann and Moser, and other leading figures such as Dagobert Peche, Eduart Josef Wimmer, and Carl Otto Czeschka, as the singular figures of the Werkstätte, this exhibition reveals the extent to which women’s contributions were underrecognized — and, too often, entirely ignored.
Before turning to the exhibition in detail, let me say that this is precisely what I hope for upon entering a museum: an exquisite experience, one that lingers in memory, stirs the imagination, and brings to light unknown worlds.
Curated by Kristina Parsons in collaboration with the Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna (MAK) — the principal lender to the show — the exhibition could not be more timely, arriving as the growing focus on women in art history signals a broader reckoning within the art world. Why the Jewish Museum? Because a great many of these designers, artists, and patrons were Jewish. The role Jews played in Viennese modernism was illuminated in Elana Shapira’s Style and Seduction (University of Chicago Press, 2016), in which she brought to light the extent of Jewish patronage during Vienna’s golden years, analyzing the central role played by Jewish businessmen, professionals, and writers in the evolution of Viennese architecture and design. But the current exhibition focuses on the women.
“Modernity and Opulence: Women of the Wiener Werkstätte” at the Jewish Museum is a rare celebration of design and beauty, featuring more than 200 works by the thirty women employed at the Werkstätte — spanning fashion, ceramics, graphic design, decorative arts, painting, and art glass, alongside one breathtaking mirror. It illuminates the full breadth of women’s contributions to one of the most significant ventures in the history of modern design during its short-lived existence, from 1903 to 1932. It is high time we learned the names of Vally Wieselthier and Felice Rix-Ueno, whose prolific work in ceramics and textile design, respectively, left a lasting mark on both disciplines; the Werkstätte’s fashion illustrators, who gave visual form to strikingly progressive ideas; Lotte Calm, Mizi Friedmann, Anna Sesznai, Hedwig Hirsch, and Maria Likarz, among others; and, of course, the critic and writer Berta Zuckerkandl, a major patron, art critic, journalist, and renowned salon host who became a central pillar of the Workshop.
These women were radical, much like their counterparts in the British Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and they held new convictions about what women of the twentieth century should be — how they might dress, how they might express themselves, including their sexuality — empowering women and carrying them out of the nineteenth century’s passive, delicate, domestic image and into modernity, giving birth to the New Woman. They liberated women from the corset and invented a new code of elegance and beauty.
In an era when design exhibitions have grown increasingly reverential and design criticism has all but vanished from the press, an exhibition devoted to the remarkable body of work produced by women at the Wiener Werkstätte feels genuinely refreshing — and offers New Yorkers a rare opportunity to encounter these treasures from the MAK’s collection firsthand. Yet if I had the chance to pose a single question to the Jewish Museum’s Director, James S. Snyder, it would be this: why has such extraordinary curatorial work not yet resulted in a publication?
