Textiles Of Klimt’s Vienna At Washington Textile Museum

Focusing on the era’s Secession movement and Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshop), this exhibition examines the artistic values and aesthetic development of the period through textiles. The Textile Museum creates an intimate, focused exhibition that highlights the period’s dramatic transformation of European art as artists began to rebel against traditionally accepted styles and media and to create new forms of art for a new era.

”As the foremost institution dedicated to textiles in the Western Hemisphere, we are pleased to present this exhibition highlighting the creative activity of the Secession movement and the Wiener Werkstätte,” said Daniel Walker, director of The Textile Museum and curator of Textiles of Klimt’s Vienna.

Goals of the Secession and Wiener Werkstätte Movements Vienna was a center of creative activity between 1897 and 1932 with the emergence the Secession and the Wiener Werkstätte. The Secession movement challenged the prevailing conservative tendencies of the Vienna Art Academy’s exhibitions and encouraged a heightened sensitivity to and appreciation for culture and arts in everyday life. The line between fine and applied arts became blurred, and the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork) was introduced. The Wiener Werkstätte was established to design and produce a full range of objects and furnishings for specific interiors in order to create a unified, harmonious ensemble.

The Workshop provided an outlet for the work of many artists in a wide variety of media – including architecture, graphic arts, painting, furniture, metalwork, jewelry, leatherwork, fashion and textiles. Textiles are one of the most resonant and revealing aspects of artistic creativity of this era and a key element in the realization of Gesamtkunstwerk.

Founding of the Secession and Wiener Werkstätte

Looking to the future and challenging the past, the Secession was founded in 1897 by a group of young artists that included the architect Josef Hoffmann, the painter Koloman Moser and the painter Gustav Klimt, who was elected its first president. An engraving at the entrance to the Secession building in Vienna conveyed the philosophy of the group: "To every age its art and to art its freedom.” The year 1903 brought the establishment of the Wiener Werkstätte by Hoffmann and Moser along with their financial backer, Fritz Wärndorfer. In an effort to recapture the aesthetic values of the pre-industrial era, the artists of the Wiener Werkstätte aspired to create well-designed, handcrafted objects and to consolidate design, production and distribution within one organization. Wiener Werkstätte participants designed Secession exhibitions, commissioned paintings from Secession artists for their interior design projects, and created the environments and clothing in which Klimt and artistic Viennese society moved.

About the Exhibition

Textiles of Klimt’s Vienna includes 58 textiles and related objects, including fabric samples, a sample book, fabric covered books, and boxes created by artists Josef Hoffmann, Dagobert Peche, Maria Likarz-Strauss and others. The definitive text on the subject, Angela Völker’s Textiles of the Wiener Werkstätte1910-1932, serves as an accompaniment to the exhibition and will be available for purchase in the shop.

The objects on view are drawn primarily from the collection of Lloyd E. Cotsen, renowned businessman, collector and philanthropist as well as a former member of The Textile Museum’s Board of Trustees. Cotsen is the recipient of the Museum’s 2007 George Hewitt Myers Award. Named for The Textile Museum’s founder and presented by the Museum’s Board of Trustees, the award for lifetime achievement recognizes his exceptional contributions to the study and understanding of the textile arts. Cotsen’s longstanding support of The Textile Museum includes founding of The Lloyd Cotsen Textile Documentation Project and the endowed Lloyd Cotsen Curatorial Scholarship Fund.

Works on Display

Curated by Daniel Walker, Director of The Textile Museum, the exhibition will be presented in four sections. Three of the four sections highlight the work of individual artists of the Secession and the Wiener Werkstätte.

One section of the exhibition focuses on architect Josef Hoffmann (1870-1956), a founding member of both the Secession and the Wiener Werkstätte. As director of the Werkstätte, Hoffmann designed textiles, furniture, and other objects. Hoffman’s best-preserved Gesamtkunstwerk, the Palais Stoclet in Brussels, Belgium, encompasses his architecture, furnishings and textiles along with mosaics by Klimt. “Showing great range in style over his long and productive career, Hoffmann’s best-known and most highly regarded textile designs are straightforward and seemingly simple geometric patterns in two colors,” said Walker.

Another section showcases the work of Dagobert Peche (1893-1923), a prolific artist in many media who designed more than113 fabric patterns for the Wiener Werkstätte. His patterns are recognized for their distinctive style that typically features the delicate representation of naturalistic forms, sometimes in large-scale repeats. Textiles of Klimt’s Vienna will highlight the graphic effects and fine-line drawing that distinguish Peche’s designs. The third section contains pieces by Maria Likarz-Strauss (1893-1956). According to Walker, “she was the most active textile designer in the workshop [Wiener Werkstätte], with almost 200 designs attributed to her.” Likarz-Strauss had a broad stylistic range that incorporated the stylized floral elements associated with Peche with the formal geometric patterns that originated with Hoffman. Yet, she is most well known for her abstract patterns with infinite repeats, which reflect the international trends that led to the Art Deco Style in the years after Klimt’s untimely death in 1918.

Completing the four sections of the exhibition is a survey of the full range of textile designs that were born from the Secession aesthetic movement and the Wiener Werkstätte. Using works from various artists, including Koloman Moser, Carl Otto Czeschka, Eduard Wimmer-Wisgrill – the first head of the Wiener Werkstätte’s fashion department – Mathilde Flögl and Felice Rix-Ueno, among others, this section will emphasize the variety of textiles and their stylistic evolution over time.

The Textile Museum will concurrently present two other exhibitions this fall focusing on collecting and collectors. Ahead of His Time: The Collecting Vision of George Hewitt Myers examines the collecting philosophy of The Textile Museum’s founder, while Private Pleasures: Collecting Contemporary Textile Art showcases contemporary textiles drawn from private collections in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan region; both exhibitions open September 28, 2007. Textiles of Klimt’s Vienna, made possible by the generous loan from Lloyd E. Cotsen’s personal collection, continues the theme of collecting present throughout all the fall exhibitions. In conjunction with the exhibitions, the Museum will present The TM Fall Symposium from October 19 through 21 on the topic The Collecting Passion.

The picture shows Textile fragment, Bavaria, Carl Otto Czeschka for Wiener Werkstätte, 1910-11. Textile Traces: The Lloyd Cotsen Collection. Photograph by Susan Einstein. -- www.textilemuseum.org