With a focus on beauty and quality, this production community of visual artists and craftsmen took a holistic approach towards unifying the multiple facets of arts and crafts in everyday life. ![]() In 1903, Hoffmann and Moser, with financial support from the Jewish textile industrialist Fritz Wärndorfer, established the Wiener Werkstätte – meaning Vienna Workshop. Reconstruction of ‘Boudoir for a Big Star’ Hoffmann also reinterpreted the floral motifs created by Morris and Mackintosh in other projects. Hoffmann aimed for the “exterior be in unity with the interior” to achieve an overall aesthetic identity. Mackintosh, who designed the Glasgow School of Art, was invited to show in the eighth Secession exhibition his geometric motifs inspired Hoffmann’s striking use of black-and-white squares in Villa Moll, which he designed for his friends Carl Julius Rudolf Moll, a painter, and Koloman Moser, an artist and graphic designer. Moving away from Art Nouveau, the Secessionists were influenced by the English and Scottish Arts and Crafts movement, including William Morris and Charles Rennie Mackintosh respectively. Then in 1897, he became a founding member of the Vienna Secession, a movement of avant-garde artists whose figurehead was Gustav Klimt. After setting up his own practice, he embraced sweeping curves in his early architectural designs. The exhibition was intended to mark the 150 th anniversary of his birth but was postponed due to the pandemic.īorn in Brtnice, now in the Czech Republic, in 1870, Hoffmann studied architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna under Art Nouveau architect Otto Wagner. A prolific designer, architect, professor and curator, Hoffmann (1870–1956) designed everything from a sanatorium and mansion to furniture and porcelain, tea sets and cutlery, belt buckles, jewellery and even wallpaper. This boudoir has been reconstructed for the exhibition, ‘Josef Hoffmann: Progress Through Beauty’ at MAK – Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna.Īssembling more than one thousand exhibits, the retrospective showcases Hoffmann’s extensive output over his multi-disciplinary career. A low glass table on a fluffy rug, a suspended lamp and encrusted wisteria lines running down ribboned walls completed the display. ![]() Epitomising elegance were a daybed and a chair both in gold, foliage-patterned fabric, with silver curving legs. ![]() Josef Hoffmann, ‘Daybed from the Boudoir d’une grande vedette ’, Paris World’s Fair, 1937ĪT THE PARIS World’s Fair in 1937, Josef Hoffmann – a trailblazer of Viennese Modernism – exhibited ‘Boudoir d’une grande vedette’ (Boudoir for a Big Star).
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