Koloman Moser: Designing Modern Vienna

“We wish to establish intimate contact between public, designer and craftsman, and to produce good, simple domestic requisites. We start from the purpose in hand, usefulness is our first requirement, and our strength has to lie in good proportions and materials well handled . . . The work of the art craftsman is to be measured by the same yardstick as that of the painter and the sculptor . .  So long as our cities, our houses, our rooms, our furniture, our effects, our clothes and our jewelry, so long as our language and feelings fail to reflect the spirit of our times in a plain, simple and beautiful way, we shall be infinitely behind our ancestors.” - Koloman Moser & Josef Hoffmann,  1905.


















When the Neue Galerie opened a decade ago in New York City, it seemed that the museum might offer an alternative to the dominant  art historical narrative of modernism as told by the Museum of Modern Art. The art dealer Serge Sabarsky and his friend, collector Ronald Lauder, were well prepared to take on the ghost of  Alfred Barr,   MOMA's first director and a confirmed Francophile.  What followed was  a series of firsts in North America, exhibitions devoted to Josef Hoffmann's Interiors (2006), the drawings of Alfred Kubin (2009), and the paintings of Otto Dix (2010), 

Koloman Moser (1868-1918) was one of the founders of the Vienna Secession in 1897, along with the painter Gustav Klimt and the architect Josef Hoffmann.   Today Moser's name is less familiar than theirs but, with Koloman Moser: Designing Modern Vienna 1897-1907, on view at the Neue Galerie from May 23 to September 2, 2013, that will change, along with the idea that Hoffmann was the group's dominant creative force.

Moser, who began his career as an illustrator, was the obvious choice to design the Secession's journal Ver Sacrum(Sacred Spring).  Published for only five years in an unusual large square format, it is a touchstone among magazines. 
 Members of the Secession were united by their iconoclasm, not by a common style. As early as 1904, the journalist Bertha Zuckerkandl writing in Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration,  noted Moser moving away from the curvilinear Art Nouveau style to a new idiom of lines and geometric shapes, one more suited to incorporating interior design into architecture.  She also identified Moser as the group's leader in developing a new vocabulary of forms.

What his contemporaries discerned, historians have overlooked.  Five years before  Gustav Klimt "discovered" the gold painted  mosaics  at Ravenna, Moser had used both in his design for the large planters that bracket the main entrance to the Secession Building in Vienna.  It was Moser who designed the  iconic black and white checkerboard chairs for Hoffmann's Purkersdorf Sanitorium.  Subtract Moser's contributions and influence to the book of 20th century design and it would be thin indeed. Creators of upscale crafts today, such as Mackenzie-Childs,  have mined the designs of  Moser, Hoffmann, and particularly the pastiche style of Dagogbert Peche.

With financial assistance from the  banker Fritz Warndorfer, Moser and Hoffmann founded the Wiener Werkstatte in 1903 to bring the Secession's vision of the total artwork or Gesamtkunstwerk toproduction. They shared a belief that social ills could be cured  by  example  and that good design was a harbinger of social progress.  We may regard their ideas as naive but  their decorative discipline achieved incomparable results, albeit exorbitantly expensive ones.  The way was prepared by Moser's 1902 interior design for the physician Dr. Hans Eisiler von Terramare and his wife Gerta Loew (who sat for her portrait by Klimt). The wallpaper used for the current exhibition was originally  designed by Moser for the master bedroom at Villa Terramare.

As it turned out, the Werkstatte's masterpiece of total design was created not  in Vienna but in Brussels.  The Palais Stoclet, which took six years to complete (1905-11,) is the closest the Werkstatte  ever came realizing the ideal put forth by Peter Berhens: a feast of life and art.  Adolphe Stoclet, a wealthy banker and his wife Suzanne Stevens Stoclet, daughter of a Parisian art dealer, were living in Vienna when they happened to meet the painter Carl Moll  in his garden.    The Stoclets were so taken with Moll's villa that they commissioned its architect, Josef Hoffmann, to design a house for them when they returned to Brussels. 

When the Palais Stoclet was completed, Josef Hoffman exulted that "this is only the beginning."   But there had been casualties along the way.  Moser  resigned from the Werkstatte in 1908.  Mismanagement of the group's finances and demanding clients had taken their toll.   Moser's final  decade was filled with painting,  theatrical productions, and postage stamp designs, a variety that points to his nickname of  tausendkunstler, the thousand-artist. 















For further reading:
Carl E. Schorske's magisterial  Fin-de-siecle Vienna (New York, Alfred Knopf: 1979) is the ideal introduction.
Wiener Werkstatte by Gabriele Fahr-Becjer, Cologne, Taschen:  2008.

Images:
6.. Palais Stoclet Interior - Instituut Agnetendal, Peer, Belgium.
7.  Koloman Moser -draft of decoration for the Terramare bedroom, 1902, Leopold Museum, Vienna.
8.  Koloman Moser - shaded green dot glassware, c.1899, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.