Wiener Werkstätte: Arts and Crafts in Vienna

The Wiener Werkstätte was a workshop in Vienna founded in 1903 by Josef Hoffmann, Koloman Moser and Fritz Waerndorfer. It designed and made silver, jewellery, furniture, textiles and entire interiors in a geometric, rational style, and operated until 1932. The idea was that applied art should have the same value as fine art.

Facts

The idea

The Wiener Werkstätte sprang from the Vienna Secession, an artists’ group from 1897 that wanted to break with academic art. Hoffmann and Moser had seen English Arts and Crafts and Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s work at the Secession exhibition in Vienna in 1900, and they wanted to do something similar: a workshop where designers and craftsmen collaborated and where every object received the same care.

The motto was that one should design everything from the building to the cutlery, a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art. The workshop got money from the wealthy industrialist Fritz Waerndorfer, and Hoffmann and Moser designed. The idea was closely related to Art Nouveau but placed more weight on pure form than on sweeping plant lines.

The forms

Hoffmann’s style at the beginning was so full of squares that he got the nickname Quadratl-Hoffmann. Furniture, silver vessels and jewellery were based on the cube, the circle and straight lines, often with a perforated pattern or black and white colouring. Moser designed, among other things, jewellery, see Koloman Moser and his brooch, and was especially skilled in graphics and glass.

The workshop stamped its objects with the monogram WW, often in a square, and with the designer’s initials. That makes it possible to recognise them. See the Wiener Werkstätte mark and the period in the database. Compare also with the softer style of René Lalique and Tiffany. The objects were sold in the workshop’s own shop in Vienna and later in branches in, among other places, New York, Zurich and Berlin.

Palais Stoclet

The workshop’s greatest commission was Palais Stoclet in Brussels, a house that Hoffmann designed for the banker Adolphe Stoclet in 1905–1911. Everything in the house was designed by the workshop: the architecture, the furniture, the silver, the lighting and even the garden. In the dining room is a mosaic frieze, drawn by Gustav Klimt and executed by the workshop’s craftsmen.

The building is one of early Modernism’s most important, with smooth white marble slabs with bronze edges. It contrasts with Klimt’s rich, gold-gleaming decoration inside. It shows the Wiener Werkstätte’s double face, pure form and luxurious ornament. Hoffmann also designed a sanatorium at Purkersdorf outside Vienna in 1904, with simple, white surfaces and furniture such as the Sitzmaschine, a chair with adjustable back. The building shows how far the workshop’s ideas of pure form had already come early on.

Change and legacy

Moser left the workshop in 1907 after a conflict over money. After the First World War the style became freer and more decorative, especially under Dagobert Peche, who came in 1915 and designed silver and furniture with undulating, almost Baroque ornament. The workshop also opened a fashion department in 1911 and published colourful textile patterns and postcards. The workshop also published postcards, drawn by artists such as Oskar Kokoschka and Carl Otto Czeschka, which helped to spread the style and made it known among many who never visited the shop.

But expensive materials and craftsmanship made production costly, and the finances were strained. The workshop went bankrupt in 1932. Its ideas of wholeness, craft and pure form continued to influence designers in Europe and the United States, and can be compared with the Bauhaus, which took a step further towards industrial mass production.

How to recognise it

Exercise

What was the Wiener Werkstätte’s idea?