Ornament, Gender, and Interiority in Viennese Expressionism

In January 1914 Arthur Roeßler's article "Women and Art" appeared in the Stickerei-Zeitung und Spitzen Revue, a journal devoted to textile art in Germany and Austria. While the embroidery of Emmy Zweybrück (fig. 1), a leading textile artist in Vienna, was ostensibly his subject, Roeßler used the opportunity to secure women's creative activities firmly within Nadelkunst and the domestic sphere. He concluded that her embroideries deserve more praise than any "square meter of painted canvas that any woman aspiring to 'high' art places on view." ¹ Stating that the best women's painting could only be an inadequate reflection of a male model, he argued that female talents lay instead in decoration, creations that were part of women's being, only hinting at an unknowable mystery beneath the ornamented surface. This characterization of ornament's superficiality contrasts with those artistic values he praised in the work of young male expressionist painters who were "able to turn the interior of people inside out" during the same period. ² Artists such as Egon Schiele defined an approach to painting that surpassed nature and became the apex of human achievement. Roeßler suggested that these artists recovered art's high calling, which had been lost through a recent preoccupation with applied art: "They want to move away from applied art, which Klimt approached happily and frequently, sometimes even at the cost of the psychological achievement of an aesthetic creation. All works for them are true works of new art, are storage batteries of psychological forces." ³

The contrast between ornament and psychological expression, between surface and depth, used by art critics of the [Begin Page 247] period to characterize the stylistic shift from Gustav Klimt's aestheticism to Schiele's expressionism, continues to be of use for thinking about Viennese modernism. ⁴ The discursive interplay between ornamentalism and asceticism yields insights about gender's role in the divide between these attitudes towards form. ⁵ Studies of the writings of Karl Kraus and Adolf Loos show how their work contributed to a critique of ornament grounded, in part, in responses to women's changing roles in the public sphere. ⁶ Fashion's expansion stimulated new perceptions about women's increasing participation in the modern world. These perceptions provoked male anxieties about fashion's impact on culture and the arts at the same time as female artists in Vienna began to organize and assert their presence in both the fine and applied arts. ⁷

Roeßler's celebrations of a new textile art and a new painting were intertwined, both being part of an effort to draw gender distinctions in a world where boundaries were becoming blurred. Too little critical attention has been afforded the emergence of an artistic style, linked to folk art and characterized by terms such as "primitive" and "expressionist," within the Wiener Werkstätte between 1905 and 1908. Women artists played a role at least equal to that of men in the development of this style, since its impetus came from textiles and it was quickly applied to Vienna's emerging fashion industry. The discourse surrounding that ornamental style infiltrated discussions about the art produced by women. Young male artists, such as Kokoschka and Schiele, had early ties to this initial "primitive" style and its application to fashion, but distanced themselves during 1909 and 1910 by developing a competing discourse about interiority that found expression primarily in their treatment of skin.

Ornament, the focus of many debates about historical styles during the nineteenth century in Vienna, continued to be an important issue during the years before World War I. Otto Wagner had questioned the suitability of using historical architectural ornament to dress contemporary buildings during the 1890s, calling for a "raiment of modernity" equally effective in expressing both the structural and symbolic character of the new architecture. ⁸ Similar desires for a modern style within painting and sculpture led to the formation of the Vienna Secession in 1897...