The Female Secession: Art and the Decorative at the Viennese Women's Academy

by Megan Brandow-Faller

Overview

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 Frauenkunst—Brandow-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 and explores the ways female artists and craftswomen reinterpreted and extended the Klimt Group’s ideas in the interwar years. Brandow-Faller draws a direct connection to the themes that impelled 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, she gives careful attention to key primary sources, including photographs and reviews of early twentieth-century exhibitions and archival records of school curricula and personnel.

Engagingly written 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780271086484
Publisher:	Penn State University Press
Publication date:	06/22/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	22 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Megan Brandow-Faller is Associate Professor of History at Kingsborough Community College, CUNY. She is the editor of Childhood by Design: Toys and the Material Culture of Childhood, 1700–Present.

Table of Contents

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

Editorial Reviews

Following the book’s aim of ‘bring[ing] a lost female heritage in handcraft and decorative art into focus,’ the book’s greatest strength lies in is its scope and interdisciplinary appeal, which allows scholars from a variety of disciplines to integrate the decorative and its proponents, the forgotten women of the female Secession, into their research and syllabi.”

—Franziska Schweiger Journal of Design History

“Brandow-Faller breaks new ground in the history of the decorative arts.”

—Niccola Shearman Art History

“Throughout this beautifully illustrated and thoroughly researched work, Brandow-Faller succeeds admirably in resurrecting an important aspect of the Viennese Secession and the influential role of women’s academies and their graduates.”

—Christa Spreizer Studies in Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century Literature

“Impeccably researched, The Female Secession is an invaluable contribution to scholarship on early twentieth-century Austrian art and to feminist art history. Brandow-Faller persuasively argues that the self-consciously feminine art produced by Women’s Academy artists should be understood as part of a feminist lineage that leads through the artwork of 1970s feminist artists such as Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro and on to that of craftivists of the twenty-first century.”

—Bibiana Obler,author of Intimate Collaborations: Kandinsky and Münter, Arp and Taeuber

“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 that 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

From the Publisher