Detail from “Girl's Ensemble (Kroj Severokyjovsky)”, c.1945; Czech; embroidered cotton and miscellaneous fabric with beads, sequins, and lace trim. Saint Louis Art Museum, Collection of Marvin E. Moehle 2022.189a-h
Beginning January 6, the Saint Louis Art Museum will offer a rare opportunity to see a gathering of modern and historic Central European textiles as part of Fabricating Empire: Folk Textiles in the Making of Early 20th-Century Austrian Design. The exhibition, which runs through May 28, 2023, explores the work and influence of the Wiener Werkstätte, or Vienna Workshops, during the first decades of the 20th century. Genevieve Cortinovis, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Assistant Curator of Decorative Arts and Design at SLAM, has been working on the exhibition since 2019. The exhibition kicks off with a public celebration on January 6 from 4-8 p.m. in Sculpture Hall. Ahead of the festivities, we caught up with Cortinovis to discuss the Wiener Werkstätte, the objects highlighted in Fabricating Empire, and the collaborations that brought this collection together.
Can you start by describing this exhibition for us?
This exhibition examines the relationship between the development of Central European folk costume and textiles and Austrian modern design. It's looking specifically at the textile department of the Wiener Werkstätte, or the Vienna Workshop. This was a progressive design house that was founded by Koloman Moser and Josef Hoffmann in 1903 in Vienna. The museum's collection is quite rich in this material, but until recently we didn't have a good representation of textiles from the firm. The Vienna Workshop made glass, furniture, graphic arts, ceramics, fashion, textiles, architecture. They were focusing on what they called the Gesamtkunstwerk, or the “total work of art.” We’ve made some interesting acquisitions in the past five years, and so we really wanted to celebrate them, but also kind of reposition them in this other conversation about empire politics, folk art, and textiles.
How long have you been working on putting this together?
It's been several years in the making. I was actually organizing it during COVID-19, but I’ve been considering it since probably 2019. I ended up having a really happy introduction to a local collector, Marvin E. Moehle, who has a really tremendous collection of costume and textiles. The museum itself just has a few examples of Central European folk textiles, and they aren't really great examples, I would say. So I couldn't have put this exhibition on without him and his collection, really his generosity and willingness to work with us. It was really his collection that allowed us to have this interesting kind of wide-angle view of this really important, progressive design firm.
Why the focus on this subject in particular? What drew you to this firm and its impact?
I've always been really taken by the work of the Wiener Werkstätte. I love their textiles in particular. They just seem timeless in a way—really graphically beautiful, rich in ornament and pattern. So for a long time I've been interested in the firm's work. And I also was really excited by recent research by a number of young scholars in the field about the politics of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Vienna, at this point in time, is not just the capital of Austria. It's a capital of an empire. So it's really the center of just a massive region, and it's drawing people from all over the region. So I was really interested in all this new research that's talking about the multiethnic identities of many of the founders and practitioners, and also about the imperial politics that played into it. Visually, the work is really, really beautiful. And then I think the story is also really rich, and it explores some ideas that we're grappling with today about appropriation, decentering the empire…a lot of interesting topics, historically speaking.
Absolutely. The history of that area and the way things split and come back together and split again over time…it’s just so fascinating the way that area has developed and changed.
Yes, and I think the other thing that's really interesting is that there's quite a rich community of people with roots in central and southeastern Europe in the St. Louis region. So I hope we’ll get some interest from the Czech, Croatian, Hungarian, Macedonian—all the different communities that make up this area.
Tell me about the objects themselves. What’s it been like working with these textiles?
I'm excited. The costumes in general, the ensembles are really beautiful. I'm using the term “costume,” but they are often called different things depending on the time period: national costume, regional dress, traditional dress…you get a lot of different variations of that. But a lot of the works in the show are thanks to Marvin, who took really detailed histories and provenance. He has these wonderful stories behind the ensembles, and some of them really speak to the tumult of the area and are just fascinating. I'm so thrilled that he was able to document the history of some of these works.
I know you’ve mentioned Marvin’s collection, but talk to me a little bit about the loans and the recent acquisitions you're working with, sort of how these different items all came together.
Detail form “Girl's Ensemble (Kroj Severokyjovsky)”, c.1945; Czech; embroidered cotton and miscellaneous fabric with beads, sequins, and lace trim. Saint Louis Art Museum, Collection of Marvin E. Moehle 2022.189a-h
We're borrowing the full costume just from one collector, Marvin E. Moehle, who's based in Granite City. He has a really rich collection of folk costumes. and he's very knowledgeable himself. He’ll be participating in a panel in February with Megan Brandow-Faller, who's a scholar of Viennese design in the early part of the 20th century. We also have a wonderful loan of a design portfolio published in an interior interior design magazine. It features a number of really wonderful flat patterns made by a number of designers associated with the Wiener Werkstätte, and we're borrowing that from St. Louis Public Library’s Steedman Architectural Collection. So that's really wonderful to have. Then from our own collection we have four recent acquisitions of printed linen with the original tags that were designed around 1910 and printed probably between 1910 and 1913 from the Wiener Werkstätte. We also have a carpet that we recently acquired maybe five years ago by Josef Hoffmann, which is also really great. There’s also a really interesting hanging by an artist named Ugo Zovetti, who was actually born in present-day Croatia, which was Dalmatia at the time. And it is a kind of pictorial hanging that we acquired actually in the 1970s. That's probably our earliest acquisition of a textile associated with the Wiener Werkstätte.
For what is a fairly narrow subject, it sounds like there will be a large breadth of items and places where the impact of the Wiener Werkstätte was felt.
It is. And it’s a really interesting topic, because the firm itself was not very financially successful. They were plagued by financial problems, but they were really influential. It's interesting the way that the financial success didn’t necessarily mirror the influence, particularly with their graphic arts and textiles, both in Europe and in America. They had a shop where textiles were sold here in the U.S. as well. The whole folk costume is also really beautiful and rich with embroidery and layers of color, and it's just really fantastic to see. I think we're representing a good swath of the territories that were ruled by Austria-Hungary at the time.
Talk to me about the plans for programming around this exhibition. I saw that you’re planning for a celebration of the exhibition on January 6.
Yeah, we are! This is kind of a new thing to the museum, to have these public openings for some of our non-ticketed exhibitions. So this is really exciting. We'll have a cash bar and some music, and we're really excited about that. There'll also be what we call Art Speaks on February 2, and that is a conversation between Professor Megan Brandow-Faller and Marvin E. Moehle about collecting Central European folk textiles. I'll be giving a member lecture as well, and that is on the 27th of January.
What do you most want people to understand as they come to see Fabricating Empire?
I think the biggest idea is that Vienna was this really multinational, rich, complex place. And part of the reason that, at this point in time, from about 1903 to 1914, the design was so influential and interesting is a reflection of that complexity and diversity. So I think that's what I hope people come away with. And I think the folk costumes from all over former Austria-Hungary and present-day central Europe speaks to that and the idea. There's just a lot of ideas and visual languages being traded and developed and exchanged at the time.
Is there anything else that you would really like our readers to know?
I think, for textiles, we always have the stress that we can only show textiles basically one year in every 10 because of the light sensitivity of this material. So this is a rare opportunity to see all of these works together. We have rotations in the galleries, but we generally are only showing one textile at a time. So we really get to show the breadth of our collection and all of these relationships across material [with this exhibition.] It's kind of a “get it while it's out” sort of opportunity. I think if you're interested in graphic design, interior design, fashion, even genealogical history or the history of the diaspora of this region or even World War I, you'll find something interesting in the exhibition.
Fabricating Empire: Folk Textiles and the Making of Early 20th-Century Austrian Design opens January 6 in Gallery 100 and runs through May 28, 2023. A public opening celebration for Fabricating Empire will take place January 6 from 4–8 p.m. in Sculpture Hall.
