Decorative handcrafts are commonly associated with traditional femininity and unthreatening docility. However, the artists connected with interwar Vienna's female Secession created craft-based artworks that may be understood as sites of feminist resistance. In this book, historian Megan Brandow-Faller tells the story of how these artists disrupted long-established boundaries by working to dislodge fixed oppositions between art and craft, decorative and profound, and masculine and feminine in art.
Tracing the history of the women's art movement in Secessionist Vienna from its origins in 1897, at the Women's Academy, to the Association of Austrian Women Artists and its radical offshoot, the Wiener FrauenkunstBrandow-Faller tells the compelling story of a movement that reclaimed the stereotypes attached to the idea of Frauenkunst, or women's art. She shows how generational struggles and diverging artistic philosophies of art, craft and design drove the conservative and radical wings of Austria's women's art movement apart. The book explores the ways female artists and craftswomen reinterpreted and extended the Klimt Group's ideas in the interwar years and draws a direct connection to the themes that drove the better-known explosion of feminist art in 1970s America. In this provocative story of a Viennese modernism that never disavowed its ornamental, decorative roots, Brandow-Faller gives careful attention to key primary sourcesincluding photographs and reviews of early twentieth-century exhibitions and archival records of school curricula and personnel.
Engagingly told and featuring more than eighty representative illustrations, The Female Secession recaptures the radical potential of what Fanny Harlfinger-Zakucka referred to as works from women's hands. It will appeal to art historians working in the decorative arts and modernism as well as historians of Secession-era Vienna and gender history.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: A Female Secession
Part I Women’s Art Education
1. The Art of Unlearning at the Viennese Women’s Academy, 1897–1908
2. Surface Decoration and the Female Handcrafts in the B.hm School
3. Separate but Equal? Academic Accreditation and the Question of a Female Aesthetic at the Viennese Women’s Academy, 1908–28
Part II The Female Secession
4. Kinderkunst and Frauenkunst at the 1908 Kunstschau
5. The Birth of Expressionist Ceramics: “Crafty Women” and the Interwar Feminization of the Applied Arts
6. Decorative Trouble: Collectivity, Craft, and the Decorative Women of the Wiener Frauenkunst
Conclusion: The Collapse of the Female Secession, 1928–38
Notes
Bibliography
Index
“This beautifully illustrated study brings new attention to the overlooked achievements of women artists in Vienna in the early twentieth century. It is a much-needed contribution to design history, which illuminates the role of gender in Central European art education and professional practice.”
—Rebecca Houze, author of Textiles, Fashion, and Design Reform in Austria-Hungary Before the First World War: Principles of Dress
