Abstract

In 1904, the Austrian sculptor Richard Luksch (1872–1936) produced two over-life-size ceramic figures of the female body for Josef Hoffmann’s famous Kurhaus at the Purkersdorf Sanatorium located on the outskirts of Vienna. Despite Luksch’s affiliation with one of central Europe’s most progressive buildings of the time and his early involvement with the Viennese Workshops, these ceramics have been virtually written out of the history of Viennese modernism. This essay strives to reinsert Luksch’s figures into this history by offering a new interpretation that contextualizes them as powerful articulations of a new type of femininity anchored in contemporary discourses on nerves and gender, namely, that of the femme fragile.

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