Josef Hoffmann, 20th century architect who brings design into everyday life
Josef Hoffmann, together with Koloman Moser, was the founder of the Wiener Werksttte movement: their goal was to bring objects of great aesthetic and artistic value into everyday life, on the model of the Arts and Crafts movement.
A’total work of art: this was the fundamental principle on which the Wiener Werkstätteart movement founded in 1903 by the architect Josef Hoffmann (Brtnice, 1870 – Vienna, 1956) and by the painter Koloman Moser with the collaboration of the industrialist Fritz Warndorfer. Main goal was to bring in the everyday life great objects aesthetic and artistic valueaccording to the model of the English and Scottish movement Arts and crafts. The latter spreads thanks to John Ruskin it’s at William Morris in the second half of the nineteenth century up to a good part of the twentieth century and received the support of artists, architects and designers, as well as philanthropists, carrying on theunity of the artsthe experience of the individual craftsman and the quality of materials to carry out the work itself. In contrast to the industrial world, they are created small workshops. Even the Wiener Werkstätte, as the name suggests (Wiener which means Viennese and Werkstätte which means laboratories, workshops), is based on production in specialized workshops.
Based on the Arts and Crafts model, the founders of the Wiener Werkstätte, active until 1932, considered the drawing to come synthesis between art and craftsmanship within everyday life. The concept of art was therefore redefined to bring theArtistic craftsmanship and the dexterity: it then began to create objects of high quality in everyday life, such as furniture, porcelain, glass, jewelry and fashion. Simple, practical and at the same time refined and elegant objects would go: figurative artists therefore gave a strong contribution to the advent of the past modernism. The thirty years of activity of the Wiener Werkstätte are, however, marked by continuous economic problems, leading to the definitive closure in 1932 due to the general impoverishment of the Viennese bourgeoisie, the main purchaser of these objects. The archive of the Wiener Werkstätte is now held at the MAK – Museum of Applied Arts of Vienna and includes 16 thousand sketches, 20 thousand textile samples, posters, sketches for illustrated postcards, catalogs, photo albums and business correspondence; in addition, the museum houses a large collection of objects from all creative phases of the artistic movement, including the largest collection in the world of furniture, objects and designs by Josef Hoffmann. Merit of the Wiener Werkstätte was to overcome the diffusion of ornaments Art nouveau of the Belgian and French styles in favor of functionality and of simple, geometric-abstract shapes, through the arts and crafts of the entire twentieth century. A renewal of art is produced based oncraftsmanship: Vienna thus became the center of the culture of taste in the field of applied arts.
As mentioned, one of the founders of the movement was the architect and designer Josef Hoffmann. Born in Pirnitz, Moravia, in 1870, Hoffmann began studying architecture in 1892 at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. In the Austrian capital he was a pupil of Otto Wagnerof which I shared the vision on function of the architect: the latter had to go beyond the art of building; it had to be designer able to design even the smallest details to give life to a little one harmonious whole. In 1897 Hoffmann founded together with a group of artists, including Gustav Klimt, Koloman Moser, Joseph Maria Olbrich and Carl Moll, the Viennese Secession in controversy against the academic world. For the Secession magazine, Ver sacred, created illustrations and decorative friezes. Six years later, in 1903, he founded with his friend Koloman Moser and the support of Fritz Wärndorfer the Wiener Werkstätte, which soon became the focus of design. You had to get away from the industrial mass production: “Better to work ten days on a single product than to produce ten products in one day”, they thought.
Among the protagonists of Viennese modernism, Josef Hoffmann had a fundamental role in the Austrian and foreign artistic scenario, both for his concept of Gesamtkunstwerkterm that was used for the first time in 1827 by the writer and philosopher Karl Friedrich Eusebio Trahndoff in one of his essays and then later by Richard Wagner who included it in his essay Art and revolution in 1849; the latter considered an expression of Gesamtkunstwerk The theater of ancient Greece, that is a theater where music, dramaturgy, choreutics, poetry, figurative arts converge, for a synthesis of the different arts. Here is the ideal of Gesamtkunstwerk was exalted by the visual artists of the Wiener Werkstätte who proposed one idealized fusion of the different arts in everyday objects.
As an architect, there are various projects by Josef Hoffmann, the main ones being the Purkersdorf Sanatorium (1904/05), Stoclet Palace in Brussels (1905–1911), the exhibition Kunstschau of Vienna (1908), the Austrian pavilion for theExhibition of the Werkbund in Cologne (1914), the Pavilion forInternational Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris (1925), on Werkbundsiedlung of Vienna (1931) and the Pavilion for the Venice Biennale of 1934. For the Universal Exposition in Paris of 1937 he made the Boudoir d’une grande vedette, consisting of a sofa bed and a chair in gilded fabric with foliage motifs and a low bed with glass table surfaces. In 1924, however, he created the furnishings for the villa in Sonja Knips, Baroness Poitiers des Eschelles and wife of the industrialist Anton Knips who played a very important role in modernism. He commissioned Hoffmann between various constructions and renovations Knips villa Considered to be the last urban villa designed by the architect with references to the Biedermeier artistic and ornamental style.
Built in 1904-1905 for Victor Zuckerkandlgeneral manager of the Silesian ironworks in Gleiwitz, the Westend sanatorium in Purkersdorf it is instead considered an extraordinary example of Viennese Secession style architecture. From a sanatorium he became a sort of hotel, a meeting place for the exponents of the transformed artistic and intellectual Vienna: Arthur Schnitzler, Egon Friedell, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schönberg, Hugo von Hoffmannsthal and Koloman Moser were often guests. Also Stoclet Palace is considered one of the architectural masterpieces of Hoffmann and the Viennese Secession: UNESCO heritage since 2009, it was built between 1905 and 1911 in Brussels on commission from the banker and art collector Adolfo Stoclet. The building bears witness to the artistic renewal in European architecture and retains most of its original fixtures and furnishings. With the works that decorate its interior made by Koloman Moser, Gustav Klimt (his famous frieze with theTree of LifeIWait IHug), Frantz Metzner, Richard Luksch and Michael Powolny, the building fully embodies the concept of a total work of art.
Josef Hoffmann was one of the most prominent figures on the artistic and architectural-decorative scene, able to create elegant and refined works and objects and to give life to an artistic movement that is fundamental for twentieth-century design. A figure that deserves to be explored both from the artistic point of view and from the historical-cultural point of view in Vienna at the beginning of the twentieth century.
To learn about the art of Josef Hoffmann, a designer who loves beauty, you can visit the site https://www.austria.info/it/arte/artisti-and-capolavori/josef-hoffmann
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The author of this article: Ilaria Baratta
Journalist, I am co-founder of Windows on Art with Federico Giannini. I was born in Carrara in 1987 and I graduated in Pisa. I am responsible for the editing of Windows on Art.
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