In a thousand-object retrospective, we discover he did everything well and with a unique, modern vision.
If there’s a once-in-a-lifetime art exhibition, and such events do happen, I’ll move heaven and earth to get there, and to write about it. The Bruegel the Elder show in Vienna four years ago is an example. He hadn’t had a retrospective — a gathering of everything worth seeing — in 450 years. The Raphael retrospective in Rome is another. Popes, presidents, and prime ministers pushed museums to let their Raphaels go. Even Berlusconi took time from bunga, bunga to make calls. The show, at the Scuderie del Quirinale, was splendid. Tintoretto in Venice, Donatello in Florence, and Delacroix in Paris were ultimate harvests, showing the best and most iconic but also the best and most obscure and the best and most cloistered. These are unique experiences.
A proper retrospective always has new, revelatory scholarship. The Europeans do it best. American museums, obsessed with marketing and audience numbers, will do a hodgepodge survey of, say, Alice Neel or Georgia O’Keeffe, offer leftovers for art history, and call it a retrospective. After I visited the Biennale in Venice in May, I crossed the Alps to Vienna. Not tugged by malamutes but by plane, though I would have gone mit dem Hunde if needed. I went to see the Josef Hoffmann retrospective at the MAK (Museum für angewandte Kunst), Austria’s main museum for craft and design.
Hoffmann (1870–1956) was a teacher, architect, designer, tastemaker, and founder and protagonist, with Koloman Moser, of the design workshop Wiener Werkstätte. Josef Hoffmann: Progress through Beauty plumbs his 60-year career and salutes his 150th birthday, via 1,000 objects, among them silver, furniture, ceramics, textiles, glass, book bindings, architectural drawings, letters, and photographs of his best buildings. I visited a few weeks before the exhibition closed in late June.
Hoffmann was part of the international Arts and Crafts movement, seeking in design the life-improving, healing qualities of beauty. Prodigious ornament? He’d have none of it. Beauty was to be found in plush simplicity, the best craftsmanship, geometry, and harmony.
He was born in Moravia, now part of the Czech Republic but then an artsy slice of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In the 1870s, the arts in Vienna sizzled. The massive Ringstrasse urban-redevelopment project was well under way in Vienna, with a historicist, flamboyant aesthetic, to be sure, but experimentation of all kinds was in the air. Hoffmann’s family was affluently middle-class and could send him to art school, though his father wanted him to be a lawyer. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna under Carl von Hasenauer, the Ringstrasse chief architect and, after he died, Otto Wagner. Hoffmann was a Rome Prize winner. After his Italy trip, he went to work for Wagner’s design firm. A star was born.
Progress through Beauty is in MAK’s railway-station-sized main exhibition hall. The museum itself is Austria’s parallel to the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. The show is organized chronologically, with graphics and text on the peripheral walls describing time spans. This makes sense. Hoffmann hit the ground running in Wagner’s studio, designing, for instance, the City of Vienna’s pavilion for Emperor Franz Josef’s 1898 jubilee exhibition, a plum assignment.
In 1898, Hoffmann was a co-founder of the Union of Austrian Artists Secession, the city’s society of avant-garde artists. In 1899, he started teaching as a professor at the School of Applied Arts in Vienna, his academic nest until he was 65. He designed the Austrian pavilion for the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris. He also worked as an architect on the Secession Building, an exhibition hall in Vienna. As avant-garde as he was, Hoffmann excelled at gathering a bourgeois and haut-bourgeois client base.
The chronological groups highlight these big projects but also organize the little ones that are often, in their own way, fascinating and seminal. Hoffmann had lots of clients. “Hoff is the only one who can bring off a new blouse as easily as a new public building,” a colleague wrote in a 1910 letter. He designed in every genre. In 1900, he designed what he hoped would become an artists’ colony of detached, single-family suburban homes on the Hohe Warte, a hilly part of Vienna. Simple, with lots of white, and airy, they have a monastic feel and reflect the Secession’s religious commitment to design stripped of gaudy historicist cant.
Hoffmann’s designs in 1904 of architecture and furniture for a sanatorium in Puckersdorf have the same aesthetic, the impulse behind which is design that calms, not agitates. At the same time, Hoffmann was doing lots of work in Art Nouveau style, decorative, feminine, and with abundant flowery lines.
The Wiener Werkstätte, a company and design collective founded in 1903, is synonymous with Hoffmann. Philosophically, Hoffmann wanted middle-class people to have as much access to high design and good production values as aristocrats did. The workshop’s products are artisan-produced and identity-reflecting in that their sleek look, quality materials, and sturdiness say of their owner, “I am modern.”
Yes, this is an English Arts and Crafts philosophy but the Wiener Werkstätte took it to the realm of mass production, much as Gustav Stickley and other Americans did. Hoffmann sought to demolish the barrier between art and everyday life, and from this quest comes his version of Gesamtkunstwerk, or unity of design.
I wrote about this concept of design when I reviewed the Gamble House in Pasadena last year. Greene and Greene, its architect, designed the house, its furniture, and its textiles, and the Gambles were rich. The Wiener Werkstätte designed everything from façades and fireplaces to coffeepots and tea towels.
So the peripheral wall panels organize us time-wise. This is vital, too, since Hoffmann worked in tumultuous times. He was indefatigably busy in times of war, depression, systems collapse, socialism, Nazism, and more war. The chronological order helps us track these events. We’re meant to move from his timeline into the interior of the big space to look at Hoffmann’s designs. His silver and ceramics are recognizably Hoffmann and Viennese. Boudoir for a Big Star — a room Hoffmann designed for the 1937 World’s Fair — is there, too. A daybed and chair in gold, foliage-patterned fabric, a mirrored floor, fluffy rug, and chrome wall covering are, together, Gesamtkunstwerk fit for a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dance movie.
Hoffmann’s Stoclet Palace in Brussels, done between 1905 and 1911, is a phenomenon in the history of houses, and that’s human history. Hoffmann supervised every detail, and at around 4,000 square feet and a huge garden he also designed, it’s the supreme flower of Gesamtkunstwerk. It’s a big detached townhouse that addresses middle-class suburban needs but also looks like a small palace. Hoffmann even designed dresses for Mrs. Stoclet to wear so she, the mistress of the house, would match.
Evoking a big house in an art exhibition is next to impossible, but it’s Hoffmann’s most lionized building, so the curators had to give it a go. Hoffmann’s ultra-clean, long lines and asymmetrical doors, windows, staircases, and halls inspired Corbusier and Mondrian. It’s abstraction in three dimensions. It’s not spartan. Klimt made mosaic friezes, and the marble walls and finishes, parquet floors, and woodwork are gorgeous.
The house still belongs to the Stoclet family and isn’t open to the public. It’s so important and so mysterious that it really deserved an exhibition within an exhibition, which it didn’t get and really couldn’t. There’s not enough space, even at MAK, to do it. There’s an essay in the book on Hoffmann’s atectonic innovations, which means architecture that protrudes into space, and a far-too-short essay on the interior, but they’re not enough.
“What did you do in the war, Josef?” is a question the show and book ask of Hoffmann’s ghost. The answer is “Not much,” either politically or as a designer. Hoffmann had good Nazi connections. Hermann Neubacher, once head of Vienna’s local public-housing authority, became Vienna’s Nazi mayor. He’d been a Hoffmann client. Hoffmann’s nephew was a high-ranking Nazi, too. Throughout his career, Hoffmann said he didn’t follow politics. He wasn’t a partisan, so this is true, but for the sake of his design business, he cultivated whoever was in power.
Austria was upheaved over and over from the end of the empire in 1918 through its breakup, the new republic’s woes in the ’20s, the Austrian Christian dictatorship in the ’30s, the Anschluss, the Nazi era, and the war itself. Powers-that-be and new nouveaux riches came and went. The book calls Hoffmann’s attitude “art egoism.” Art was the beginning and end for him. He took opportunities as they came, and he marketed to all comers.
Hoffmann tried to join the Nazi Party but was rejected. Both Hitler and Albert Speer knew his work but didn’t think it was important. The Wiener Werkstätte went bust in 1933. The book is very good in reporting Hoffmann’s discouragement over the state of Austrian design in the ’30s. It had, he felt, lost its mojo. He might have believed that Austria, which he felt was the crown jewel in the Reich, would see his best design practices celebrated, but, no, Hitler, though Austrian, didn’t much like Vienna.
The exhibition spotlights Hoffmann’s work during what the book calls “the dictatorships of the 1930s.” Hoffmann wasn’t idle. He designed showrooms for Vienna’s House of Fashion and, working for Lobmeyr and Augarten Porcelain Manufactory, glass and ceramics. He designed one house that actually got built. His style during and after the war was more minimalist. Vienna was seriously bombed at the end of the war, but Hoffmann, 75 in 1945, wasn’t much involved in rebuilding. The exhibition and book might make too much of Hoffmann’s late career. Not for lack of creative energy, he seems in the ’20s to have reached the end of his time of moving from triumph to triumph. This was a function of the times, not of Hoffmann.
Progress through Beauty is smartly curated as an exhibition relevant to art appreciators and specialists. I fall in between and am closer, insofar as Hoffmann is concerned, to an art appreciator since I’m neither a Secession specialist nor an architect. That said, Hoffmann’s idiosyncratic work in freeing form, unifying the design arts, and emphasizing beauty are clear, even amid 1,000 objects.
I read the catalogue, which the authors call “a guide to his oeuvre.” It’s an intense, abundantly illustrated handbook to his work. There are 40 short essays — having lots of three- or four-page essays is now standard for big-topic exhibitions, and Hoffmann is a big topic. Some, such as “The Viennese Style: Interiors, 1900–1918,” by Christian Witt-Dorring, one of the curators, are anchors. Heavy on black-and-white photographs of Hoffmann’s home interiors, it presents arrangements that no longer exist and shows us how various Hoffmann was. Clearly, he catered to lots of different tastes while staying faithful to his own aesthetic.
The dissemination of Hoffmann’s aesthetic is a vast topic. He designed Austrian pavilions in lots of world fairs. His influence among designers in France, Belgium, and Sweden is explored in short pieces. An essay on Hoffmann in Hollywood is more title than substance. Hoffmann never went to America, though his son, Wolfgang, moved to Chicago and had a design business there. An essay on Hoffmann and women’s fashion was a revelation. Hoffmann saw their bodies as another surface to design. Viennese fashion would be a good topic for the Costume Institute at the Met. The Austrian museums have done fashion shows, but I don’t think American museums have tackled them.
MAK’s director, Christophe Thun-Hohenstein, wrote an essay called “Hoffmann’s Dream of a High Quality Society” in which he coined the term “Climate Modernity.” Much as Hoffmann promoted progress through beauty, Thun-Hohenstein prescribes “climate beauty,” which is using ecological standards to define design that satisfies the Paris accord, you know, the agreement among gasbags, charlatans, kooks, and phonies to try to control, of all things, the climate of a 4-billion-year-old planet, the climate about which our knowledge is middling.
I’m all in favor of ecology, but the road to a cleaner environment leads to China’s and India’s marquee pollution, not to candlesticks, goblets, and fauteuils. Praise the Lord, no one else in the book or the show says boo about this, so chalk it up to a director’s prerogative to be crazy dumb. Thun-Hohenstein needs to stick to art history.
The Hoffmann exhibition was well worth the trip to Vienna. I was there for a day and a half, so I focused on Hoffmann. The Austrians rallied their inner Nazi during the Covid catastrophe, embracing a ruthless lockdown and isolation of anti-vaxxers just short of sending them to camps. Like most fanaticisms, this seems to have passed. I’m looking forward to my next visit.
