A desire for beauty

This city today is best known for its impeccably preserved remnants of the Habsburg empire: Baroque residences and monumental palaces. Balls still serenaded by Strauss waltzes. Lipizzaner stallions still prancing under crystal chandeliers. So it’s difficult to imagine an era when Vienna also embodied the cutting edge.

But a landmark exhibition that opened here last month reminds us of a time when imperial Vienna -- or at least part of it -- was stunningly modern. Featuring about 1,200 pieces (many from private collections), the exhibition commemorates the centenary of one of the most innovative artistic movements in modern Europe.

Founded in 1903, the Wiener Werkstatte (literally, “Vienna Workshop”) brought together a remarkable array of designers and artists who rejected the gilded grandeur of imperial tastes in favor of bold new shapes, patterns and textures for home furnishings and articles of everyday life.

More varied in their aesthetic range than their contemporaries in the Art Nouveau, Arts and Crafts and Bauhaus movements, artisans of the Wiener Werkstatte created angular chairs with concentric wood frames; vases of hammered silver with industrial grid designs; wallpaper and clothing, some with stark block-printed pat-terns, others that took their designs from Moravian or Bohemian folk art; tableware with vastly streamlined curves and lines; dramatic blue glass bowls with jutting angles; and box-shaped wooden tables concealing a multitude of drawers.

Some of these styles have become so much a part of the vernacular of modern design that their radical origins are now largely unrecognized.

The long-handled flatware sold at such emporiums as Crate and Barrel and Williams-Sonoma had its origins in the Wiener Werkstatte. Many of today’s light fixtures and what are commonly known as cafe or ice cream parlor chairs also drew their inspiration from chairs made in Vienna in the first 20 years of the last century.

The movement’s breadth, innovation and often startling features are well illustrated by the new exhibition called “Yearning for Beauty,” which will remain on view through March 7 at the Museum fur Angewandte Kunst (Museum of Applied Arts), known as the MAK, parent of the MAK Center in West Hollywood. The museum is located on Vienna’s famous Ringstrasse -- a long succession of the kind of imposing classical and even gaudy buildings that Werkstatte artists disdained.

The show attempts to explain the often quixotic goals of the movement’s founders and place them in a historical context. The style found its patrons and its inspiration at the same time that the city’s intellectual community was in greatest ferment. Sigmund Freud was writing on dreams, playwright Arthur Schnitzler was bringing sexually explicit topics to the stage, and Arnold Schoenberg was beginning work on his 12-tone musical system.

“The Wiener Werkstatte was extremely radical. It was a rebellion from the historicism of the art of the period,” says chief curator Christian Witt-Dorring, who put together the show and worked on the lustrous catalog.

With customers like the family of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and the furniture magnate Leo Waerndorfer, the Werkstatte movement had a sympathetic audience, particularly among Jewish members of Vienna’s haute bourgeoisie, who were also trying to make a mark on the Austrian capital’s style.

The exhibition pays tribute to the movement’s struggle to survive, as well as its reach. The Werkstatte was never an overall financial success, but the deprivations of World War I and the economic distress of the 1920s proved crippling. By 1932, it had closed up shop. Also by that time, some of its most generous financial patrons and customers, sensing a rising tide of anti-Semitism, had left the country.

The Werkstatte was formed by the partnership of Josef Hoffmann, a Moravian-born architect, and Koloman Moser, a graphic artist and designer from Vienna, both of whom taught at the School of Applied Arts. They were fellow artistic radicals in Vienna’s Secession movement, formed a few years earlier when a number of artists left the traditional arts academy to espouse more modern and cube-like architectural designs. But in just a few years, they became increasingly drawn to the already mature British Arts and Crafts movement and focused on the design of interior spaces and their furnishings.

They borrowed the workshop model from the British architect and designer Charles Ashbee, who pioneered the idea of an artistic studio cum production center where artists, designers and artisans were partners in the creative enterprise.

Ardent admirers

HoffmanN and Moser were also admirers of the work and philosophy of the British designer and artistic radical William Morris. Like Morris, they abhorred the mass production of the Industrial Age. They wanted each Werkstatte piece to be individually designed and crafted so that it resembled no other. In addition, Hoffmann was close to the Scottish architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and there is a marked resemblance between the two men’s furniture designs, which strip away the overstuffed upholstery of the 19th century to revel in the spare, angled grace of the frame of a chair or bench.

It was in 1903 that Hoffmann and Moser got the backing they needed to open the Werkstatte’s doors. Its godfather was Fritz Waerndorfer, a Jewish textile manufacturer and banker who appreciated the two men’s work and was willing to take the financial risk of fully backing the Werkstatte, which moved into three floors of a building in Vienna’s modest 7th district.

In 1905, in a statement of the movement’s philosophy, Hoffmann and Moser wrote: “The limitless harm done to the arts and crafts field by low-quality mass production on the one hand and the unthinking imitation of old styles on the other is affecting the whole world like some gigantic flood.... It would be madness to swim against this tide. Nevertheless, we have founded the workshop.”

One of the most innovative, if impractical, ideas of the Werkstatte’s founders was known as gesamtkunstwerk, or “total work.” Its object was to design an entire space, such as a house or cafe, so that every piece in it would be by the artists and artisans of the Werkstatte.

“This is one of the things that the Wiener Werkstatte is most famous for -- designing everything from the architecture of the building to the light fixtures, the chairs and china,” said Wendy Kaplan, curator of decorative arts at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which is mounting its own major show in December of the Arts and Crafts movement and its different faces in various European countries.

Only a handful of these efforts to create such a unified artistic vision remain. One is a recently restored sanitarium in Purkersdorf, just outside Vienna, in which everything from the building’s boxy architecture and broad windows to the chairs the patients used in the refectory was designed by Hoffmann and Moser.

The Palais Stoclet in Belgium was another building in which everything from the architecture to the plates was the product of Werkstatte artists. The painter Gustav Klimt, a member of the Werkstatte’s board of directors, contributed a frieze that covered the dining room walls. Another gesamtkunstwerk was the Cabaret Fledermaus in Vienna, with its trademark black-and-white floor contrasting sharply with walls covered with geometric tiles in bold primary colors.

Although the Palais Stoclet is closed to the public and the Fledermaus is long gone, just one block from the Ringstrasse is the Cafe Museum, beloved by Viennese students and professors, artists and businesspeople who still stop by daily for a melange (coffee and hot milk) and a slice of apple strudel.

The cafe, designed by Hoffmann’s fellow Moravian architect and Werkstatte colleague Adolf Loos, was recently restored to its former glory, and it is possible to glimpse the effect the Werkstatte artists were striving for. Although the chairs, tables, wallpaper and sconces are all striking by themselves, taken together they present a harmonious whole. The dusty green wallpaper lends an air of quiet to the busy interior, and the light wooden chairs can be easily moved from one table to another to accommodate groups of friends who sit elbow to elbow.

Another key to the Werkstatte founders’ philosophy was the goal of bringing beauty to items of daily use: teapots and flatware, boxes and vases. Like their counterparts in the British Arts and Craft movement, they believed art should not be something only for the most privileged but integral to everyday life. In rejecting the gilded look favored by the era, the Werkstatte artists worked instead in bronze and steel, hammered nickel, wood and ceramic, glorifying ordinary materials with artistic design.

A focus of the MAK show is the movement’s prescient commitment both to recognizing individual artisans’ efforts and to forging a corporate identity. Each craftsman had a stamp with his initials and imprinted his work with it -- the show includes a collection of these stamps -- while all Werkstatte products were stamped with a signature “WW.”

“They were trying to create a national design identity. It was the first example of branding,” says curator Witt-Dorring.

The Werkstatte style evolved considerably over the years, as did the range of products. From the spare furniture and household items designed by Hoffmann and Moser in the early years, the artists moved toward more decorative designs. Vines and leaves adorned lamp stands. Metalwork was often elaborately carved. The Werkstatte also branched into textiles and clothing. Its dresses proved popular enough that it opened a shop on the most stylish street in Vienna, the Graben.

But the onset of World War I, which drained the empire economically and forced many of the Werkstatte artists to go to the front lines, heralded a long slide during which only a few of the organization’s works proved popular and successful financially.

Today, by contrast, Werkstatte pieces are collectors’ items, worth far more than they were in their own time. The notecards and cabaret programs turned out by designers go for $300 apiece, and pieces from more limited series, such as whimsical Christmas cards with flattened folk-art perspectives, can cost up to $2,000.

In an innovative partnership, the MAK has teamed with a number of Vienna’s home stores and galleries to showcase products that the merchants still offer using Werkstatte designs. Some of the galleries spent the last year buying original works to add to what they already had.

At Woka, a lamp store where the merchandise is modeled on originals designed by Hoffmann, Moser and Otto Wagner, owner Wolfgang Karolinsky is passionate in his commitment not only to the Werkstatte’s designs but to its credo of individualized production. The 50 models sold by the store are crafted by artisans, many of whom trained, like Werkstatte craftsmen, at Vienna’s School of Applied Arts.

Karolinsky began going to flea markets while in graduate school studying music composition and, having picked up a few pieces, found himself becoming more and more interested in the Werkstatte’s history. He now has an encyclopedic knowledge of the field. Both reproductions and originals, he says, sell best overseas, where they are more appreciated than at home.

“Vienna really should be better known for the work of this period,” Karolinsky says. “It was far more important artistically than is well understood. I am sorry about that. There are some people who know about it, but not enough.”

Katherine Zetter-Karner -- who helps her mother run the Galerie bei der Albertina, devoted to Art Nouveau and Werkstatte pieces -- has helped put together a room showcasing Werkstatte glassware, paintings, vases and jewelry.

“What is really interesting about these pieces is that they are still so modern, although they are 100 years old,” she says. “The forms are simple, geometrical, severe, spare.... It was the avant-garde, and in a way it still is.”