Commencing production with metalwork, the WW (1903-1932) expanded to encompass leatherwork, toymaking, textiles, embroidery fashion and ceramics: many of which were fields that had (or came to have) particular associations to femininity. Linking interwar Austria’s most radical women painters, architects, and a younger generation of artist-craftswomen, Harlfinger-Zakucka and her new league strove to define ‘women’s art’ on their own terms, unconstrained by the gendered dialectic surrounding ideas of women’s art.Īttracting interwar Vienna’s most progressive women artists, the Wiener Frauenkunst possessed a significant minority of Jewish members and strongly represented the intermedial artist-craftswomen dominating the Wiener Werkstätte (WW), co-founded in 1903 by Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser, during and after the Great War. Yet, despite the way it provocatively embraced ideas of a feminine aesthetic and media, the ultimate goal of the group’s activism was to undermine gender discrimination in the art world altogether. Likewise, Wiener Frauenkunst artists tended to specialize in decorative and applied arts, fields of practice with long-term associations to the feminine, yet created innovative works embracing contemporary movements like Expressionism, cubism and primitivism. On one level, many Wiener Frauenkunst members flirted with ideas that they-precisely because of their longtime exclusion from academic institutions-possessed unique access to the sort of unmediated expressivity linked with the art of tribal peoples and folk cultures. Led by Fanny Harlfinger-Zakucka, the Wiener Frauenkunst championed the Klimt Group’s philosophies on the equality of art and craft and the provocative idea of a separate feminine aesthetic and women’s ‘natural’ connection to the decorative- but in a way that subverted the gender-specific ideology slotting women into the applied arts in the first place.
The league drew its membership base from Women’s Academy graduates including ceramicists Wieselthier and Singer, who trained with Klimt Group members Adolf Böhm and Otto Friedrich as well as pioneering Austrian Impressionist Tina Blau-Lang. The Wiener Frauenkunst (Viennese Women’s Art) was founded in 1926 as an offshoot from the conservative Association of Austrian Women Artists (1910).
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