The Total Art: Vienna’s Century, From the Gold Frieze to the Contemporary Era

The Painters and the Break 

It began as a rebellion in paint. In 1897 Gustav Klimt led a group of artists out of the  conservative Künstlerhaus to form the Vienna Secession, and from the start the movement  insisted on something heretical: that the applied arts deserved equal standing with the fine.  Klimt’s gold; the Beethoven Frieze, the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, the shimmering surfaces  in which the human figure dissolves into ornament, was itself a kind of argument that the  decorative and the profound were never opposites. Around him gathered the talent that would  define the era: Egon Schiele, whose anguished line the Werkstätte sold when no dealer would  touch it; Oskar Kokoschka, whose unsettling portraits the Workshop also supported before he  left for Germany and Expressionism. The painters set the temperature. What the architects and  designers did next was carry that temperature into every room of a life. 

The Architects and the Built World 

The architecture came from Otto Wagner, the father figure, whose Postal Savings Bank and  Majolica House dragged Vienna from historicism into the modern, and who taught both  Hoffmann and Koloman Moser. From Wagner’s studio the line split. Adolf Loos took the road  of pure austerity, “ornament is crime”, and his bare, perfectly proportioned interiors stand as  the necessary foil to everything the Werkstätte believed; the two together, the plain and the  patterned, are both unmistakably Viennese. Hoffmann took the other road, toward the  Gesamtkunstwerk, building the Sanatorium Purkersdorf, the Stoclet, the country houses of the  Primavesi family; total environments where he designed the building and then refused to stop,  carrying his authority down to the textiles and the rugs. The next generation, Oskar Strnad and  Josef Frank, softened this into a livable modernism; Frank would later carry the Viennese sensibility to Stockholm and the house of Svenskt Tenn, one of the quiet bridges between Vienna and Scandinavian design. 

The Workshop and Its Two Tempers 

The Wiener Werkstätte, founded in 1903 by Hoffmann, Moser, and the financier Fritz  Waerndorfer, was the machine that turned all of this into objects. Its early aesthetic, governed  by Hoffmann and Moser, was geometric and severe, the Gitterwerk, the grid of punched  squares; Moser’s checkerboards; a beauty achieved by subtraction. Then in 1915 Hoffmann  brought in Dagobert Peche, and the workshop’s whole temper changed. Peche reintroduced  fantasy, spiky, theatrical, half-Rococo and half-future, and oversaw nearly three thousand  designs before his death at thirty-six in 1923; the Metropolitan and the Neue Galerie now credit  him as a direct forerunner of Art Deco. The tension between these two men, the grid and the  flourish, the rivet and the vine, is the signature of Austrian design, and it is what separates  Vienna from the lacquered cool of Paris and the chrome of New York. 

The Fashion and the Body 

No account of this world is complete without the dress, because in Vienna the body was simply  another surface to be designed. The couture house Schwestern Flöge, opened in 1904 by Emilie  Flöge, Klimt’s companion and muse, the probable woman of The Kiss; was outfitted by  Hoffmann and Moser as a Werkstätte commission, down to the wallpapers and the labels, a  corporate identity built as a total work of art. Flöge’s radical reform dresses, loose and  uncorseted, were sewn from Werkstätte fabrics, and the chequerboard and spiral motifs that  presaged the Workshop’s design appear in the very portrait Klimt painted of her in 1902. In  1910 the Werkstätte opened its own fashion department under Eduard Wimmer-Wisgrill,  employing some eighty artists to design textiles, lace, hats, and bags. The same pattern that ran  across a dress might run across a wall and across a knotted carpet, fashion, textile, and floor  were one continuous fabric. The Workshop even designed the first loose, corset-free gown, a  garment Paul Poiret admired and emulated in Paris. 

The Floor That Finished the Room 

And so to the carpet, which in this philosophy was never chosen last. From the beginning  Hoffmann and Moser, who had shown his first hand-knotted rugs as early as 1898, treated  carpets as inseparable from architecture. The weaving was carried principally by Johann  Backhausen & Söhne, the firm that wove the Stoclet and Primavesi textiles and still holds the  archive today, in two registers: machine-woven velour broadloom, and the prized hand-knotted  “Smyrna” carpets, from hall runners to room-scaled pieces. Patterns were produced in alternate  colourways to suit a given interior, and migrated freely between cloth and floor. Otto Prutscher  translated Secessionist line into mosaic-like carpet geometry; the women of the Workshop; Maria Likarz, whose designs stayed in production until 1930, Felice Rix, Mathilde Flögl,  defined the surfaces of everyday Viennese life, painting with cloth years before Paris caught  the idea. Examples now reside in the MAK, the Neue Galerie, the Metropolitan, and the Art 

Institute of Chicago, whose Moser carpet is woven in the Ghiordes knot of the classical Eastern  tradition; Vienna speaking, through wool, the oldest language of the loom.