EXHIBITION

POETRY OF THE ORNAMENT
The Backhausen Archives

13.11.2024–09.03.2025
Exhibition Leopold Museum

The company Joh. Backhausen & Söhne, founded in 1849, is among the most tradition-steeped producers of upholstery and decorative fabrics in Viennese history. The company’s main lines of production were premium fashionable fabrics, fabrics for upholstery and curtains, as well as damasks, brocades and carpets made from silk and wool. From 1903, Backhausen focused on collaborations with artists of Viennese Modernism, including Josef Hoffmann, Koloman Moser, Joseph Maria Olbrich, Jutta Sika, Dagobert Peche, My Ullmann and Otto Prutscher. The company specialized in turning their designs into commercial products, and established itself as the main supplier of the Wiener Werkstätte. This exhibition shows 270 selected exhibits of the Backhausen-archive, which consists of approx.. 11.000 objects.

Digitale Ausstellung

The Backhausen company, founded in 1849, is among the most tradition-steeped producers of upholstery and decorative fabrics in Viennese history. Established by Jakob Backhausen, who had come to Vienna in 1811, the company remained family-owned, as is reflected in its changing names, ranging from Karl and Johann Backhausen & Co. via Johann Backhausen, Imperial Royal ­exclusively Privileged Fashion and Chenille Factory, to Johann Backhausen & Söhne. The company was entrusted with supplying textiles for the most prestigious mansions and magnificent buildings in Vienna and left its mark on Viennese Modernism both nationally and internationally by expertly interweaving the traditional with the avant-garde.

The exhibition Poetry of the Ornament sheds light on individual production stages – from the design via fabric samples all the way to the execution –, focuses on textiles, some of which are known from historical photographs, and thus shining the spotlight once again on the Gesamtkunstwerk of Viennese Modernism. Based on various thematic emphases, the exhibition affords insights into the holdings of the Backhausen Archives, which comprises thousands of objects, and makes them accessible to a broad public for the first time.

We wish to express our sincere gratitude and pay tribute to Dr. Louise Kiesling (1957–2022) who, with passionate enthusiasm and great ideational and monetary commitment, championed the Backhausen Archive’s systematic scientific reappraisal, the creation of an inventory, as well as the photographic documentation and the storing of the holdings in keeping with museum conservation standards. She thus managed to preserve this precious cultural heritage for posterity. Without her valuable work for the Backhausen Archives, which in 2022 have been placed under monument protection in their entirety on account of their uniqueness, this exhibition would not have been possible. Curators: Ursula Oswald-Graf and Aline Marion Steinwender

“Yet more famous are his [Koloman Moser’s] drawings for the upholstery fabrics and carpets by the Backhausen company in Vienna. They do not claim to stand alone or exhaust all conceivable effects but rather only truly come into their own in the interior, in their application as a floor carpet, drapery, or upholstery. And then it is in an entirely surprising and artistically convincing way.“

Hans Folnesics: “Das moderne Wiener Kunstgewerbe”, in: Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, vol. 3, no. 6, 1900, p. 274.

The Backhausen Archive comprises thousands of objects, including graphic designs by over three hundred designers, swatches, sample books, collection catalogs, and – the centerpiece of the archive – six design books. The selected exhibits are intended to exemplify the sheer variety of these creations and their stylistic plurality of modern and historicizing trends, as well as provide an illuminating insight into the comprehensive holdings of the archive. The objects shown here are working drawings and sketches that may also bear instructions for knotters, designers’ notes, or company stamps. The work titles refer either to a chronologically numbered design – if they went into production and were recorded in the design books – or to a sketch that usually remained unexecuted.

Josef Hoffmann, a pupil of Otto Wagner, professor at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts and founder of the Wiener Werkstätte, was a restless designer of textiles. The collection of fabric and carpet designs in the Backhausen Archive is impressive proof of this. Even though Otto Wagner marked the beginning of Backhausen’s collaboration with architects and craftsmen of Viennese Modernism, and Koloman Moser’s first design for the company dates from 1898, it is the more than 40 years of collaboration with over 250 designs by Hoffmann that exemplify the development of Viennese Modernist textile history.

STOCLET HOUSE – PRIVATE HOME AND ARTISTIC TREASURE

Stoclet House in Brussels embodies the idea of the Modernist Gesamtkunstwerk – or total work of art – like no other building. It became the magnum opus of Josef Hoffmann and the Wiener Werkstätte and has been inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List since 2009.

Constructed between 1905 and 1911, every single aspect of the house – down the minutest detail of its décor – celebrates the triumph of the arts and beauty. “Here one comprehends the true magnitude of Hoffmann’s art that, where it is given free rein, is capable of reaching great heights in the bold dawn [of a new movement],” wrote the art historian Amelia Sarah Levetus at the time. Indeed, Adolphe Stoclet, director of the Société Générale de Belgique, gave the Wiener Werkstätte an almost unlimited budget and unconditional trust. The interior reflects the status, property, and culture of the Stoclets. Richly ornamented carpets line the floors like subversive counter-architecture. Traversing the landings of the staircase is a velour runner (Design 7741), whose floral pattern and bright color scheme form a pleasant contrast to the natural Belgian blue stone of the pillars, floors, and steps.

CABARET FLEDERMAUS – MEETING PLACE OF THE VIENNESE ART SCENE

In 1907 Fritz Waerndorfer, cofounder of the Wiener Werkstätte, initiated the construction of Cabaret Fledermaus at Kärntnerstrasse 33, on the corner of Johannesgasse 1. At 440 m2 it was to become a hub where the stars of the Viennese art scene endlessly came and went and where every theatrical, literary, and artistic innovation of the prolific Modernist movement was propagated. Its interior decoration was guided by the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk – or total work of art – and was the responsibility of Josef Hoffmann in collaboration with other famous artists like Oskar Kokoschka, Carl Otto Czeschka, and Eduard Wimmer-Wisgrill. Not only the architectural forms and the furniture, but every single element of this basement club – from its programs and stage costumes to its marketing materials and flatware – was artistically conceived and produced by the Wiener Werkstätte.

The centerpiece of the cabaret was the main room that housed the stage. Its floor was covered not in black and white tiles like the bar but in a square-patterned blue velour carpet (Design 6412) designed by Hoffmann, who also created a matching curtain fabric (Design 6314) for the stage, which, however, was not used. More curtain fabrics were produced for the changing stage plays, such as the design “Efeu” [Ivy] (Design 6217), which was intended to convey an open-air atmosphere, and the fabric design “Gitterkörbchen mit Rosen” [Small Latticework Basket with Roses] (Design 5054), which went into production at Backhausen as early as 1904.

THE KNIPS VILLA AS AN ARCHITECTURAL PORTRAIT

The garden villa on Nusswaldgasse 22 in Vienna’s nineteenth district fulfilled a long-cherished dream of Sophie Amalia Maria (known as Sonja) Knips, née Dame Portier des Chelles, wife of an industrialist and passionate patron of the Wiener Werkstätte. In 1924/25 Josef Hoffmann replaced the Biedermeier house in which Berta Zuckerkandl had lived until 1913 with an architectural portrait of its new resident. The centerpiece of the interior is the open-plan dining room, which can be seen from the hall and reveals a portrait of Knips by Gustav Klimt (1897/98). The painting’s impact is further enhanced by the bold and expressive pattern of the chair covers and carpet. Perfectly color-coordinated, Dagobert Peche’s “Viola” (Design 10213) design for chair fabric with its floral pattern in pink ombré picks up the delicate shade of the sitter’s dress. The vibrant ornamentation of the velour carpet “Salerno” (Design 10026-1) by Julius Zimpel, woven in 1925, continues in the same vein, making the room oscillate and enhancing the art experience that culminates in the encounter with the sitter herself. Hoffmann embedded Klimt’s Portrait of Sonja Knips in the fairy-tale, ornamental structure of an other-worldly nirvana. It is thus no accident that the Knips villa became a meeting place for the former representatives of the artistic avant-garde. Knips also reused the knotted carpet (Design 9602) with its sparsely scattered pale pink floral motifs, which Hoffmann had designed for the salon of her city apartment in 1915, in her small salon in the villa.