The Female Secession by Megan Brandow-Faller

Author:Megan Brandow-Faller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Pennsylvania State University Press

33. Vally Wieselthier, Figur mit zwei Vögeln (Figure with two birds), 1920. Glazed earthenware. Exhibited at the 1920 Kunstschau. From DKD 47, no. 12 (1920): 100.

34. Dina Kuhn, Bacchante, 1920. Glazed earthenware. Exhibited at the 1920 Kunstschau. From DKD 47, no. 12 (1920): 100.

Likewise debuting at the 1920 Kunstschau were the so-called Frauenköpfe (women’s heads), a distinct form of expressionist ceramics that parodied the tropes of decorative femininity wielded by misogynist critics, including women’s supposed penchants for vanity, superficiality, and face painting. Wieselthier’s biographer Marianne Hussl-Hörmann argues that a predilection for subject matter featuring “strong women” from history, mythology, and religion may have symbolized the “self-assertiveness and freedom” of the heads’ creators.51 Kopriva, Schmidl, Neuwalder-Breuer, Schaschl, and Singer-Schinnerl showed no fewer than eight Frauenköpfe at the exhibition. The earthenware heads were notable for their conspicuous use of enameled paint suggesting heavily applied cosmetics, a type of surface decoration figuring the ways in which makeup had become “a medium of self-expression in a consumer society where identity had become a purchasable style.”52 As detailed below, the decorative Frauenköpfe not only related to the ways in which cosmetics emerged as a lightning rod for broader conflicts over women’s societal roles but mocked misogynist critics who collapsed “women’s art” with face painting. In addition to large collections of figural ceramics by Wieselthier and Singer-Schinnerl, the 1920 Kunstschau featured artistic toys, painted and etched glassware, enamelwork, embroidery, painted furniture, and reverse-glass painted by other Böhm school Mehrfachkünst-lerinnen such as Jesser-Schmid, Likarz-Strauss, Löw-Lazar, and Otten-Friedmann. Much like the ceramic Frauenköpfe, the glass- and enamelwork was characterized by an experimental, boundary-defying character refuting handcraft’s alleged inferiority vis-à-vis the “fine” arts, a tendency particularly pronounced in the series of large-scale enamel panels, both figural and abstract, made by Otten-Friedmann and other KW collaborators.53

Broached by such ceramic sculpture, the central issue for critics was, to quote Tietze, whether “the applied arts is a phenomenon that stands on equal terms next to high art, only differentiated through materials and technique, or a perverse connection of art and industry, neither one nor the other in essence.”54 Given the gravity of the postwar socioeconomic crisis, reviewers remained polarized. Through his role as cofounder of Vienna’s Gesellschaft zur Förderung moderner Kunst (Society for the advancement of modern art) in 1923, which held public lectures and exhibitions, Tietze was known as a critical leading protagonist for interwar contemporary art. He felt that such an art should reflect a new postwar spirit of social democracy in opposition to the elitism he associated with past styles and movements. But despite his enthusiasm for expressionist painting, Tietze was far less generous toward the idea of expressionism in the applied arts, particularly during the immediate aftermath of the war. Assessing the 1920 Kunstschau, Tietze found the WW’s lighthearted “ornamental soap bubbles” to be the products of an “unhealthy hothouse environment,” divorced from the social spirit of the present.55 Here, not unlike the 1970s feminist art movement (largely representing the interests of privileged white women), it is important

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