Jewish Museum Exhibit Traces Women’s Impact on Vienna’s Modern Design Movement

Religion Unplugged reports that a Jewish Museum exhibition in New York is examining how women, including Jewish artists and patrons, helped shape the Wiener Werkstätte, an influential Vienna design collective founded in 1903. Presented in cooperation with the MAK - Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna, “Modernity and Opulence: Women of the Wiener Werkstätte” brings together about 200 objects and artifacts spanning fashion, textiles, ceramics, decorative arts and other disciplines. The workshop remained active through 1932 and offered women entering public life and paid employment a route to sustained artistic careers.

Nearly 200 women worked for the multidisciplinary collective, and at least one-quarter were Jewish, of Jewish descent or from Jewish families. The exhibition gives particular attention to Vally Wieselthier and Felice Rix-Ueno, whose work influenced ceramics and textile design. Objects include Rix’s colorful designs for clothing, tableware, toys and wallpaper, as well as Fritzi Löw’s intricately beaded “Adam and Eve” bag. Other displays include fashion postcards, more than 500 patterns created between 1910 and 1917, Susi Singer’s green and gold oven design, and Wieselthier’s glazed earthenware mirror and large ceramic heads. Kristina Parsons, the museum’s assistant curator, said the workshop became an important professional channel for women artists while encouraging artistic experimentation.

The show also places the Werkstätte within early 20th-century changes in women’s education, employment, political participation and clothing. Its fashion department enabled women to influence ideas about modern femininity through garments and accessories intended for daily use. Jewish patrons also contributed to the workshop’s success. Socialite and arts patron Adele Bloch-Bauer and journalist and salon hostess Berta Zuckerkandl are among those highlighted, while progressive Jewish clients commissioned interiors and furniture, wore Werkstätte fashions and used its stationery for Rosh Hashanah greetings. Although financial problems, poor management, resistance to mass production and declining patronage contributed to the collective’s closure, the exhibition argues that its artists left a lasting mark on modern design. “Modernity and Opulence: Women of the Wiener Werkstätte” continues through Nov. 15 at the Jewish Museum in New York.