The Jewish Museum’s Superb Tribute to the Women Who Helped Shape Viennese Modernism

An exhibition that has just opened at The Jewish Museum, “Modernity and Opulence: Women of the Wiener Werkstätte,” contains over two hundred items by thirty artists. Still, you’re likely to walk away with one name and one name only prominently etched in your memory: Vally Wieselthier (1895-1945). Part of this recognition is in the numbers, thirty-some Wieselthier pieces are on display, and part is the impressive variety of objects to which her designs were applied: These include glassware, posters, ceramics, toys, fireplace cladding, coffee pots, sugar bowls, lamps, lace panels, textiles, lino-cuts, and book covers. Granted, a lot of the ladies who worked at the Werkstätte were capable artisans. The evidence is plain to see at the Jewish Museum.Yet few of them were as idiosyncratic, authoritative or daring as Wieselthier in their approaches to material, color, surface, rhythm and effect. The centerpiece is a trio of her glazed earthenware sculptures, each of them a numbered head of a woman. You don’t need to know the era in which they were shaped to intuit how much they are indicative of an age of changing mores and expanding liberties. “Girl’s Head with Blue Outlined Eyes” (1928), with its unflappable stare and stylish accoutrement, is of a piece with a decade that also claims Louise Brooks, Florine Stettheimer and Josephine Baker.“Modernity and Opulence” was organized by the museum’s Leon Levy Associate Curator, Kristina Parsons, and though she consulted with the good folks at Vienna’s Museum für Angewandte Kunst, this is her first solo effort as curator. She’s modest, Ms. Parsons, claiming that the show “makes no claim to completion.” What it does is lay out in handsome measure the Werkstätte’s commitment to stemming the tide against “the boundless evil . . . sweeping across the world.” That evil? Mass production and a concomitant diminution of aesthetic quality in consumer goods.The scribes behind that dramatic turn-of-phrase were Josef Hoffman and Koloman Moser, an architect and artist who, along with cotton magnate Fritz Waerndorfer, founded the Wiener Werkstätte as an enterprise devoted to the manufacture of luxury items. These men had been involved with the Vienna Secession, an Austrian branch of Art Noveau that would later influence Art Deco adjacent movement. The Vienna Secession placed a premium on creative ideals imbued with democratic and, if not necessarily religious import, then metaphysical promise. “The choice between commerce and art is the issue at stake in our Secession . . . ,” wrote the playwright and critic, Herman Bahr, “[it] is a confrontation between two different spiritual states.”High-flown talk, that’s for sure. The early 20th-century was rife with starry-eyed artisans who sought to create a world in which the rigors and pleasures of art were the stuff of everyday life. History has a way of upsetting these collectivist enterprises, but the Werkstätte had a good run. Founded in 1903, the company struggled through material shortages during World War I and ultimately gave up the ship in 1932. The world economy proved unamenable to its continued maintenance of exacting standards, as well as attempts at international expansion.The Werkstätte, largely through the offices of the architect Josef Urban, did make its way to the United States and got a foothold in both New York and Hollywood. Among the items on display are a suite of collotypes by Gustav Klimt produced specifically for the American market, as well as snippets from two films, Jacques Feyder’s “The Kiss” (1929) and Alan Crossland’s “Enemies of Women” (1923). The former stars a smiling Greta Garbo and the latter is hilariously inapt. Attendees of the press preview couldn’t scoff enough at its antediluvian chauvinism. The production design of both films are heavy on the streamlined contours typical of the Werkstätte.Anders Randolf and Greta Garbo in ‘The Kiss’, 1929. Via MGM and PhotofestAs is made plain by the exhibition’s subtitle, “Modernist and Opulence” concentrates on the integral role women played in the workplace. Vienna was hardly a hotbed of feminism back in the day, nor was it kindly disposed to Jews, so the considerable prominence of both at the Werkstätte speaks well of its progressivism. Of the two hundred or so women who have been identified as employees, a good quarter of them were Jewish. “These women,” writes Ms. Parsons, “probed at the constraints of modernist design languages and societal expectations by embracing opulence, experimentation, and plurality.”Plurality, maybe, yet the Werkstätte was a business predicated, in part, on uniformity of product. But experimentation and opulence are on full display and awaiting one’s relishment. Among the highlights of this elegantly mounted exposition are a softly stated fabric design by Mizi Friedman installed side-by-side with the carved blocks that went into its printing, Klara Posnanski’s rambunctiously unregulated textile designs, and an array of postcards that will prompt swooning amongst adherents of fin de siècle art. Spidery lines, sinuous rhythms, and nature’s beneficence made sleek are the standard here.Ms. Parsons and The Jewish Museum have put together a venture that is as crystalline as it is eye-opening. Congratulations are due. Now let’s get them cracking on that Wieselthier retrospective.

The Jewish Museum’s Superb Tribute to the Women Who Helped Shape Viennese Modernism

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