This Content Downloaded From 195.43.22.136 On Mon, 28 Jun 2021 17:31:38 UTC

“An Artist in Every Child—A Child in Every Artist”: Artistic Toys and Art for the Child
at the Kunstschau 1908

Author(s): Megan Brandow-Faller
Source: West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture ,
Vol. 20, No. 2 (Fall-Winter 2013), pp. 195-225
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Bard Graduate Center
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/674729
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
The University of Chicago Press and Bard Graduate Center are collaborating with JSTOR to
digitize, preserve and extend access to West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History,
and Material Culture
This content downloaded from

195.43.22.136 on Mon, 28 Jun 2021 17:31:38 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
“An Artist in Every
Child—A Child in
Every Artist”:
Artistic Toys and
Art for the Child at
the Kunstschau 1908
Megan Brandow-Faller
City University of New York/Kingsborough
This article analyzes the nexus of women, children, and primitivism at the landmark
Vienna Kunstschau exhibition of 1908 staged by the Klimt Group. Because of women’s
“natural” connection to child rearing, female art students in Secessionist Vienna were
perceived as ideal designers of toys, books, and furniture inspired by the primitivism of the
untutored art of the child and by traditional folk-art toys. Critical reactions to the Art for
the Child section of the Kunstschau revealed the discursive similarity of women’s and
children’s art in the eyes of conservative and progressive critics alike; whether this affinity
was praised or condemned revealed critics’ broader attitudes toward the Secessionist
Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) and the limits of women’s inclusion in this project.
The Klimt Group’s serious investment in child art suggests that artistic toys were far
from child’s play; rather, the toys were integral to their greater philosophies on the beautif-
ication of utility and the interpenetration of art and everyday life.
The idea that modern art and design can sometimes resemble the efforts of
children has long persisted as a trope for dismissing radical innovations that
privilege access to “childlike” inner expressivity, spontaneity, and freshness
over skilled academic rendering.1 But to early twentieth-century avant-garde
movements across Europe, drawings made with the “innocent eye” of untutored
children embodied the same untainted qualities found in the arts of so-called
primitive tribal peoples from Africa, Oceania, North America, and the pre-
historic past.2 Educational reforms inspired by the Vienna Secession (1897), a
movement whose leaders placed great faith in the “spirit of youth through which
the present always becomes modern,” were largely responsible for stimulating
the avant-garde’s serious investment in children’s art.3 Implicit in the Viennese
discovery of children’s art was the notion that adults had something to learn
from the aesthetics of untutored children’s drawings—lessons that fin-de-siècle
Crystalline Bodies 195
195

195.43.22.136 on Mon, 28 Jun 2021 17:31:38 UTC
Vienna’s female artists and designers understood quite well.4 Frequently
conflated with primitive folk culture and children, women occupied a similar
position as gendered other owing to their supposed closeness to nature and
marginalization from academic institutions. Yet female art students in fin-de-
siècle Vienna harnessed their perceived naiveté and closeness to children to
transcend the trivializing stigma attached to the feminine stereotype in art and
design; they, like children, had lessons to teach the male Secessionists. 5
In this article I explore the nexus of women, children, and primitivism in fin-
de-siècle Vienna through the lens of toy and furniture design.6 Given women’s
“natural” connection to child rearing, and the belief that women were “biologi-
cally more attuned than men to the psychological, emotional and physical
needs of children,” female students at the Austrian Kunstgewerbeschule (School
of Applied Arts, or KGS) and the Wiener Frauenakademie (Viennese Women’s
Academy, or WFA) experimented with designing objects intended to plant
seeds of artistic sensibility in children’s souls.7 The artistic toys and furniture
for children unveiled at the Kunstschau exhibition of 1908 were inspired by the
aphorism that “an artist lies hidden in every child and a child lies hidden in
every artist.”8 Building upon parallel educational reforms, the female designers
who exhibited their work in the Kunstschau’s Art for the Child section privileged
a deliberately stylized primitivism simultaneously referring to traditional carved
wooden Bauernspielzeuge (peasant toys) and the grammar and syntax of chil-
dren’s drawings. Such designers believed that references to naive folk art and
children’s drawing spoke a design language that would stimulate children’s
imagination and their inborn creative instincts. As the Austrian critic Joseph
Lux reasoned, artists “must see the world with the eyes of a child, naively, with-
out presuppositions.” 9 Likewise, it was felt that the simple forms and reductive
geometry of objects displayed in Art for the Child would plant adult principles of
good design in the young. An elaborate Secessionist-style dollhouse represented
nothing less than a miniaturized Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art).
New feminist perspectives on the 1908 Vienna Kunstschau arise when we take
a closer look at the artistic toys and furniture created by female students of
WFA professor Adolf Böhm and from the genealogy of these objects’ designs in
the aesthetics of children’s drawings and folk art.10 The 1908 Kunstschau was
an ambitious exhibition of art, architecture, and design intended to educate
visitors about introducing a coherent artistic style into all facets of everyday
life: the so-called Stilkunst that conservatives believed debased easel painting.
Often regarded as the zenith of the Viennese Secessionist Gesamtkunstwerk, the
landmark art show was organized by the Klimt Group (including Gustav Klimt,
Josef Hoffmann, Adolf Böhm, Koloman Moser, and Franz Čižek), the rebel-
lious offspring who broke away from the Vienna Secession in 1905 to level the
boundary between fine and applied arts, acting on their conviction that the
arts formed an integrated and unified whole.11 Unsurprisingly, the Kunstschau
organizers devoted unusual energy to supporting younger artists, among them
the Vienna Moderns’ self-styled enfant terrible, Oskar Kokoschka, and Böhm’s
young protégées. The works of Böhm’s students, displayed in Kunstschau Room
29 as Art for the Child, ranged from graphic works and illustrated books, to
carpets and tapestries, to artistic toys and children’s furnishings. Among the key
196 West 86th V 20 N 2

195.43.22.136 on Mon, 28 Jun 2021 17:31:38 UTC
figures were Fanny Harlfinger (1873–1953), a multitalented artist and designer
who contributed a maple-and-ebonized-wood nursery suite and turned wooden
toys; designer and illustrator Wilhelmina (Minka) Podhajska (1881–1963); and
Madga Mautner-Markhof (1881–1944), designer of the elaborate Secessionist
dollhouse. Art for the Child promoted a vision of how art and play could awaken
children’s creativity and lead to a lifelong appreciation of art and the applied-
arts Gesamtkunstwerk in their daily lives.
Female designers at the Kunstschau’s Art for the Child section appropriated
Lux’s “eyes of the child”—meaning a reductive naturalism or abstracted way
of representing people and objects, a creative spontaneity, and, above all, the
untainted naiveté and honesty he prized in folk and children’s art. The degree
to which the Viennese avant-garde and the general public were willing to take
lessons from traditional artistic outsiders like women and children unfolded
in surprising ways, suggesting that critics actually valued children’s art over
women’s handicrafts. Art for the Child likewise raised the question of whether the
playthings were really designed for children or were merely a site of creative
experimentation for grown-ups preoccupied with the childlike.12 Ultimately,
whether female designers’ stylization of childish aesthetics was taken earnestly
or trivialized revealed broad criticisms of the Secessionist Gesamtkunstwerk
ideology— and attitudes toward women’s place in shaping it.
Primitivism, Folk Art, and Artistic Toys in

Turn-of-the-Century Vienna
Progressive pedagogical reforms spearheaded by the Vienna Secessionists

provided the inspiration for a new language of toy design that looked to the
primitive rawness and stylized awkwardness of children’s drawings and tra-
ditional peasant toys. Children’s drawings had been the subject of serious
academic study by pedagogues and child psychologists throughout much of the
nineteenth century, but it was only around 1900 that children’s art began to be
emulated as a source of aesthetic value in and of itself. It was not child psycholo-
gists but avant-garde artists who led the charge in reevaluating the aesthetic
qualities of the “innocent eye” that many nineteenth-century theorists had
dismissed. Though technically not the first to recognize the aesthetic qualities
of children’s drawings, the Viennese artist, pedagogue, and Secessionist Franz
Čižek (1865–1946) was the first person to teach an art class “with the express
purpose of providing children with creative liberty and the chance to work from
their imagination.”13 Čižek’s celebration of the honesty and directness of what
he termed “child art”—a unique stage of artistic expression that followed its
own rules—posited explicit links to the art of the primitive; it was precisely the
“primitive” state of nature that Čižek and his Secessionist colleagues so prized.
Čižek’s philosophies on children’s creativity were translated into adult design
principles as female artists trained at the WFA and KGS created artistic toys by
tapping the primitivism of children’s drawings and folk toys.
In tandem with the Secessionist credo Ver Sacrum (Sacred spring), referring
to a socially engaged spirit of artistic youth that would rejuvenate art, craft,
“An Artist in Every Child—A Child in Every Artist” 197

195.43.22.136 on Mon, 28 Jun 2021 17:31:38 UTC
and society, the Vienna Secessionists looked to the originality and authentic-
ity of the child art famously “discovered” by Čižek.14 Studying at the Viennese
Academy of Fine Arts in the mid-1880s, Čižek offered informal art classes to
neighborhood children and became fascinated by the rhythmic, expressive
qualities of children’s drawings that seemed to follow, as he later recalled,
“eternal laws of form.”15 Čižek soon realized that children had more to teach
him than the academy and, consequently, began taking child art more seriously
than his painting career. The shared enthusiasm of Secessionist colleagues like
Klimt, Hoffmann, Otto Wagner, Koloman Moser, and Felician von Myrbach
for child art encouraged the pedagogue to register his celebrated Jugendkunst-
kursen (youth art classes), open to children aged four to fourteen, in 1897, the
same year that Klimt and the younger generation of artists were plotting their
famous walkout from the conservative artists’ guild.16 Čižek pioneered a student-
centered approach to teaching his experimental courses— a method he labeled
Entschulung der Schule (de-schoolification of the schools) or “letting the children
teach themselves”—which shunned traditional copying from models in favor of
awakening children’s inner expression through drawing, painting, sculpture,
collage, and diverse handicraft techniques.17 Čižek spurred “unlearning,” the
pedagogical principle absorbed by Secessionist toymakers. Instead of correct-
ing children’s mistakes in proportion, perspective, and color, he believed such
“errors” to be essential to child expressivity and to lend child art its individual
style. According to his theory of the teacher’s “hovering presence,” Čižek’s
method consisted only in guiding pupils to release internal images, untarnished
by adult models, in the material that appealed to them.18 Indeed, throughout
his career Čižek maintained that it was he who learned from children and not
vice versa. Exposed to such reformist theories at the KGS (with which his youth
art classes were affiliated from 1904 to 1938) and the progressive WFA—institu-
tions likewise promoting Secessionist ideals of the unity of art and craft—female
toymakers were profoundly influenced in their design strategies by reformist
attitudes toward the creative child.19
Largely through Čižek’s efforts, the untutored art of children and the art of
“less civilized,” prehistoric, or ancient peoples were positively conflated in the
minds of Secessionist commentators, who projected their generational revolt
against academicism back into the childhood of humanity. So enthused were
Gustav Klimt and his contemporaries about the spontaneous authenticity of
children’s drawings that they, according to one of Čižek’s assistants, almost
found it unnecessary to “go back to the Chinese, Japanese, ancient Egyptians
and Negroes” because here in child art “was that which they sought.”20 Similarly,
in reviewing a Viennese exhibition of children’s art in 1902, Ludwig Hevesi,
champion of the Secession and the Klimt Group, spoke of finding there “the
dark recesses of beginnings from which something like a proto-culture arises.”
He concluded that children’s art was like “Urkunst [primeval art], instinctive and
unconscious.”21 Hevesi was not alone in pointing to the connections between the
dawn of humankind and the dawn of each human life; commentators like Lux
and Adolf Loos also acknowledged such evolutionary parallels. Yet Secessionist
critics like Hevesi praised children’s art for precisely the same reason that the
famous opponent of ornament censured it. Arguing that each child repeated
developments that took humanity thousands of years to go through, the anti-
198 West 86th V 20 N 2

195.43.22.136 on Mon, 28 Jun 2021 17:31:38 UTC
Secessionist Loos insisted that drawing instruction should “help children to
leave their primeval condition,” not cultivate it.22 Loos’s views on children’s
drawing are part and parcel of his broader critique of ornament and the
applied-arts Gesamtkunstwerk. Indeed, given that he lumped women and chil-
dren in the same discursive category as that of supposedly less civilized people
owing to what he considered their mutual propensity to ornamentation, Loos
believed that the pretensions of Secessionist toymakers in seeking to fuse Kunst
and Handwerk served to debase art rather than elevate craft.23
Hevesi’s sentiments on children’s drawings aptly summarize the primitive quali-

ties that toymakers emulated in their designs. The critic found “many rather
‘modern’ characteristics” in children’s art.24 Not only did children exhibit a will
to stylize but, like contemporary painters, preferred to draw from memory or
imagination, reducing the natural world to its essential details. Not necessarily
accurate, but emotionally expressive, reaching even “visionary moments . . . like
little X-rays,” their art was most important in its rendering of content.25 The
critic gave the example of a kindergartner’s drawing of her kindergarten: the
girl depicted her teacher without arms, which was logical, according to Hevesi,
since the teacher did not work with her hands. As Lux stressed, children tended
to see summarily or impressionistically, leaving out the unessential. Children’s
manner of dealing with spatial perspective also exhibited a tendency for stylized
abstraction, which “made the child into a little ancient Egyptian.”26 Handling
the nose and the second eye and ear when drawing in profile tended to present
children, like the pharaonic artists, with similar problems. Rather than dismiss
such incorrect representations, Secessionists pointed to the spontaneity, integ-
rity, and even monumentality with which they were executed. To the adult eye,
the child’s drawing of a promenading family frequently used in Čižek’s lectures
must have looked stiff, rigid, and technically flawed, with frontal eyes in profile
and spatial distortions (fig. 1). Yet when the pedagogue encountered skepti-
cal adults, he defended the drawing’s artistic qualities, declaring, “Look at the
strength of these figures. They are as monumental as the Sphinx, as powerful
as figures in a bas-relief of Ancient Egypt. How characterized they are, and what
rhythm there is in spite of their stiffness.”27 Čižek’s words speak to the Seces-
sionist belief that outstanding art and design were characterized by expressive
integrity rather than skilled academic rendering.
The same mentality was applied to the design of toys and artistic objects for
children. Avant-garde künstlerische Spielzeuge (artistic toys) adopted many of
the traits admired in children’s art, such as formal reductionism and primitive
stylization, and made deliberate references to the “childish” traits of folk art.28
Rejecting the fin-de-siècle’s oversaturated civilization, artistic toy designers
Fanny Harlfinger, Minka Podhajska, and Marianne Roller (trained at the WFA
and the KGS) tapped two main sources for inspiration: children’s drawings and
traditional wooden peasant toys (particularly those produced in the Grödnertal
Fig. 1 in the southern Tyrol and in the Erzgebirge mountains between Saxony and
Gertrude Brausewetter, Bohemia). Here, within the context of the avant-garde’s fascination with primi-
Untitled. Reprinted from A tivism, it is important to reiterate that scientific and artistic studies frequently
Lecture by Professor Cizek
(London: Children’s Art conflated the work of women, children, and folk cultures: positive appraisals
Exhibition Fund, 1921), 12. of this conflation tended to reveal critics’ pro-Secessionist affinities.29 Čižek

195.43.22.136 on Mon, 28 Jun 2021 17:31:38 UTC
acknowledged similar parallels, conceding that women’s intuition and “delicate
emotions” made them particularly well suited for early childhood education.30
Consequently, looking to the “primitivism” of KGS female students, whose
designs, like folk art, “displayed a similar fresh and vibrant character,” was logi-
cal for Secessionist professors.31
In light of this discursive nexus of women, children, and the primitive, let me
emphasize that female Secessionist toymakers did not view the practice of toy-
making as a frivolous or secondary side pursuit. Curiously, even though better-
known male artists, “greats” like Hoffmann, Moser, and Ferdinand Andri, also
practiced toymaking, modernist playthings have been largely marginalized
from the historiography of modern design, even as recent exhibitions have
striven to correct this imbalance.32 On the contrary, the Vienna Secessionists
strove to revive an older model of toy production, encapsulated by Karl Gröber
in his landmark cultural history of toys, whereby toy production belonged to
the greater output of specific master craftsmen.33 Here, Gröber’s nostalgia for
the workshops of the golden age of German toys must be weighed against con-
temporary perceptions of toymaking as particularly appropriate for women.
In the words of the Studio correspondent Amelia Levetus, toymaking was
“essentially suited to women, for they better understand child nature than men;
they are nearer to them in thought, and sympathize with them in a way that
men rarely do.”34 Since “one who does not understand children could hardly
turn his thoughts in the direction of toymaking and invading the children’s
domain,” contemporary critics argued that “by employing women-designers
possessing the necessary qualities, much good could be achieved and the field
of toymaking greatly enlarged.”35 Arguments that women could, better than
men, see with the eyes of a child not only related to maternalist discourses
linking women and children but also revealed certain critics’ reluctance to
accept toys—and by extension everyday objects more broadly—as truly artistic
objects. As Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock have pointed out, “In this
hierarchy the arts of painting and sculpture enjoy an elevated status while
other arts that adorn people, homes, or utensils are relegated to a lesser cul-
tural sphere under terms such as ‘applied,’ ‘decorative,’ or ‘lesser’ arts”; the
assumption is that creating the latter involves “a lesser degree of intellectual
effort.”36 Framed in light of this gendered hierarchy of art and craft, fin-de-
siècle Vienna’s female toy designers subverted the idea of toys as “minor” side
pursuits through their conscientious mode of working and devoted themselves
to studying appropriately “primitive” models with the utmost seriousness.
Traditional carved wooden toys from the Grödnertal and the Erzgebirge
provided ideal sources of inspiration for Secessionist toymakers. Woodcarving
had flourished in these regions as a source of supplementary income since the
late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and they were the main areas of
production for early Nuremberger wares sold in the imperial capital. Peasant
craftworkers originally sold their carved ware at seasonal markets or peddled
it in rucksacks. By the nineteenth century a vigorous cottage industry system
developed whereby so-called Verleger (literally, merchants who “put out” produc-
tion orders, but best understood as toy wholesalers) coordinated distribution
and marketed the cheap wooden toys to mass markets via illustrated catalogues
200 West 86th V 20 N 2

195.43.22.136 on Mon, 28 Jun 2021 17:31:38 UTC
Fig. 2
Linocuts of peasant toys
from the Collection of
Josef Hoffmann, Cotsen
Children’s Library,
Department of Rare Books
and Special Collections,
Princeton University Library.
Photograph courtesy of
Princeton University Library.
and sample books. Ironically, the crudeness of the forms admired by Secession-
ists resulted in part from the pressure on the exploited rural manufacturers to
produce higher output for lower wages in the face of competition from other
toymaking centers and the advent of mechanized production in factories.37
Increasingly specialized methods of production and simple technologies such as
the turning lathe were introduced to speed up production. Above all, it was the
stylized anonymity and crude distortion of form brought about by lathe turning
that fascinated Secessionist toymakers.38
Secessionists praised the simplicity and childlike innocence of locally made

objects—for instance, the traditional turned wooden Puppe mit Wickelkind (doll
with infant) collected by Josef Hoffmann—for their potential to nurture chil-
dren’s creativity. Hoffmann amassed a large collection of peasant toys, acquired
on holidays in the Erzgebirge, which bordered his native Bohemia, and from
regular trips to Viennese flea markets, and made them available to his students
for study. As Lux declared in praise of traditional peasant prototypes, “For
centuries, our mountain villagers have produced cheap toys, which the people
carve themselves from wood, according to their innocent, childish perceptions:
peasant toys.”39 The hand-turned figurines shown in linocuts in figure 2 are
crudely, even imperfectly, formed and only summarily describe the mother and
child and the market scene represented. Lux claimed that city dwellers might
nonchalantly dismiss such objects, saying “there is nothing to them.” Yet therein,
he argued, lay the charm; such simple objects created by peasants were con-
ceived with the eyes of a child.40 Just as the very young recorded details of the
world around them in summary or impressionistic ways, peasant toys had simple
forms that were merely shorthand for objects and characters to be animated by
the child’s imagination. Julius Leisching, who organized important exhibitions

195.43.22.136 on Mon, 28 Jun 2021 17:31:38 UTC
of modernist and traditional Grödnertal toys in his capacity as director of the
Brünn (Brno) Museum of Applied Arts, agreed with Lux. He observed that
“everywhere the truly artistic trajectory in modern toymaking is focused on
simplification,” for such honest forms could teach children much more about
the world than the “brilliant mechanism of an automatic machine.”41 Even the
Berlin-based art historian Paul Hildebrandt, who generally prioritized accuracy
in miniaturization, conceded that traditional wooden toys “have something
personal, individual about them, and there are such wonderfully worked figures
that one might almost know their creators.”42 Just as Čižek defended distortions
in children’s drawings, Secessionist toy designers rejected banal verisimilitude
and mechanical deception in favor of a simplified design language that reduced
reality to its most basic forms.
Pedagogical reformers believed that artistic toys’ simplified and even imper-
fect shapes encouraged children’s creativity because they merely suggested
relationships to the real world of things. Unlike mainstream nineteenth-
century toys—“complicated machines” with their “silly details” replicating
the adult world in painstaking miniature—reform toys let the children,
and not the toy, do the playing.43 Intricate technological toys, those that
groomed middle-class boys for technical careers and those that prepared
girls to be mothers and domestic managers before letting them grow as
individuals, were harmful because they dampened children’s fantasy and
creative impulses.44 The true value of a plaything was, to quote Lux, “not
what it is, but what it could become in a child’s hands.”45 In the “perfect
world” of technological miniatures, then, the only possibility for creative
self-activity was destructive; that is, the child playing with a toy had “to
destroy [it], in order to build it again.”46 Lux’s fixation on the child’s
impulse to destroy perfect toys was not unique. Reform toy proponents in
Alexander Koch’s progressive journal Kind und Kunst repeatedly pointed to
this tendency, as well as to the way the invented toys of peasant children
Fig. 3
Fanny Harlfinger, Selection
of artistic toys, ca. 1906.
Reprinted from The Studio 38,
no. 159 (June 1906): 217.
202 West 86th V 20 N 2

195.43.22.136 on Mon, 28 Jun 2021 17:31:38 UTC
(inanimate objects such as blocks of wood that became anything in
their hands) were infinitely better than the toys of the “poor children
of the rich.”47
Drawing on the language of traditional peasant toys, innovative designers

of artistic toys trained with Kunstschau co-organizers Böhm, Hoffmann,
and Moser at the progressive KGS and the WFA: institutions firmly commit-
ted to Secessionist ideals on the unity of art and craft, the interdisciplinary
Lehrwerkstatt (learning workshop) principle, and modern ideas of Material-
gerechtigkeit und Zweckmässigkeit (suitability of material and utility).48 This
shared interest in artistic toymaking resulted not only from similarly pro-
gressive views on applied-arts education—questioning traditional methods
of copying ornament, pattern design, and true-to-life naturalism—but also
from the professional overlap between the institutions: numerous WFA and
KGS students joined their mentors’ applied-arts commercial workshops, the
Wiener Werkstätte (1903–32).49 Cofounded by Josef Hoffmann and Koloman
Moser in 1903, the Werkstätte borrowed an emphasis on quality craftwork
and close cooperation of designers and producers from C. A. Ashbee’s Guild
and School of Handicraft (without Ashbee’s social reform program) and
produced, in addition to furniture, textiles, and metalwork, finely illustrated
children’s books, games, silver rattles, and stand-up cutouts.
In this interdisciplinary workshop atmosphere, Secessionist professors like

Hoffmann, Moser, and Böhm had a reputation for giving their female students
creative free rein to experiment. Furthermore, their students demonstrated “a
particular calling” for toymaking in exhibitions and periodical coverage preced-
ing the 1908 Kunstschau.50 Common among toy designers were a characteristic
formal reductionism, primitive stylization, and deliberate references to childish
traits of folk art and children’s drawing. Ranking among the most acclaimed
toymakers in Vienna around 1900 were WFA classmates Fanny Harflinger and
Minka Podhajska. Both studied under Böhm, a founding member of the Seces-
sion (and the subsequent Klimt Group), who imparted his artistic versatility to
his students. Devoting the same exactitude to play figurines as to painting or fur-
niture design, Harlfinger and Podhajska studied woodcarving and lathe-turning
techniques to produce stylized versions of traditional peasant toys. To Secession-
ist Tausendsassas (all-rounders) like Harflinger and Podhajska, toymaking was
hardly a secondary pursuit but exemplified the Secessionist credo that art, archi-
tecture, and decorative objects should form a harmonious design environment.
Harlfinger’s toys, which tended toward formal reduction, were constructed of

simplified rounded shapes turned at the spindle lathe, with only minimal addi-
tions of limbs. Figure 3 provides a good example of the typical “bowling pin”
shape that, according to Leisching, “children’s eyes loved.”51 Indeed, Lei-
sching correctly pointed to the suitability of such toys for children as the artist
exploited the stiff, stylized awkwardness and formal simplification that was cel-
ebrated in Čižek’s students’ drawings (see fig. 1). Harlfinger and her classmates
had access to such images not only through various children’s art exhibitions
around 1900 but also at planning meetings for the Kunstschau, at which a
remarkable atmosphere of creative exchange among old and young prevailed. 52

195.43.22.136 on Mon, 28 Jun 2021 17:31:38 UTC
Harlfinger’s captivation with the childlike can be seen in her so-called Viennese
types (fig. 4). The turned and painted clothing of her toy figurines (including
fashionably dressed ladies and gentleman, children, governesses, and a bishop)
evoked the simple fashions of the Biedermeier era, yet did so in a manner deriv-
ing from the stylized exaggerations and formal simplifications present in
figure 1. Harlfinger’s proclivity to use stylized distortion is evident in the toys in
figure 3, which were loosely inspired by elaborate Spanish baroque dress associ-
ated with the Habsburg golden age. Despite these historical references, however,
Harlfinger again filtered historical costume through children’s eyes by omitting
nonessential details and reducing the figurines’ bodies to ovoid and rounded
shapes (see fig. 5). Likewise, the handling of the figurines’ facial features shows
her decided preference for “childlike” manners of expression, as in the button
eyes and rounded pink cheeks typical of traditional prototypes from the Gröd-
nertal and the Erzgebirge (see figs. 6–7).
Such stylization can best be observed in photographs of toys, now in a pri-

vate collection, identical to those illustrated in contemporary periodicals (as
in figs. 3–4). For instance, the Spanish courtier illustrated in figure 5 shows
Harlfinger’s preference for generalized forms. Like the children who left out
nonessential pictorial information, Harlfinger reduced the shape of her fig-
ure to essentials, greatly exaggerating the broad swell of the dark cloak over
the spindly legs. The distorted bodies of her figures (including the Rococo
Pair perched atop her Kunstschau cabinet; see fig. 14) are far from being
anatomically correct yet render court costumes with a simplicity of expres-
sion. Referencing traditional turned wooden toys, made from as few pieces
as possible, she omits the hands and arms as distracting from the figure’s
evocative mood. Indeed, viewers are struck by her very “childish” manner
Fig. 4
of depicting a furrowed brow. Overall, Harlfinger’s figure is mysteriously Fanny Harlfinger, Selection of
suggestive despite a minimal number of markings. A similar trend toward turned wooden artistic toys
formal simplification and plastic humor can be seen in Harlfinger’s take (Viennese types), ca. 1908.
Reprinted from Obrázkový
on monks, devils, paupers, Bergmänner (miners), “Turks,” and other stock Vzořník Hoř ických Hracek
figures, traditionally manufactured in the Erzgebirge and the Grödnertal, (Ho ř ice, 1909), n.p.
204 West 86th V 20 N 2

195.43.22.136 on Mon, 28 Jun 2021 17:31:38 UTC
Fig. 5 (top)
Fanny Harflinger, Spanish
Courtier, ca. 1906. Private
collection, Vienna.
Fig. 6 (middle)
Fanny Harflinger, Rococo
Ladies with Cavalier, ca. 1906.
Private collection, Vienna.
Fig. 7 (bottom)
Fanny Harflinger,
“Turk” figurines. Private
collection, Vienna.

195.43.22.136 on Mon, 28 Jun 2021 17:31:38 UTC
often as functional decorative objects, such as incense burners. Yet com- Fig. 8
Marianne Roller, Artistic
pared to traditional nineteenth-century versions, Harlfinger’s figurines delib-
toys, ca. 1907. Reprinted
erately display a formal simplicity and, as with the courtier, lack nonessen- from The Studio 42, no. 176
tial details like limbs (although hands are suggested in the decoration). All (November 1907): 162.
three Turk figurines shown here were constructed from the same generically
turned forms, but each stiff yet lively figure is personalized with detailed
decoration. As Levetus observed of Harlfinger, “She paints each figure
herself, no two of them being alike, and delights in her work.”53 Tendencies
toward abstraction and humorous stylized distortion are even more exag-
gerated in Marianne Roller’s toys. 54 Roller’s take on the traditional market
scene borders on the grotesque; the bodies of the market shopper and the
vendor have been reduced to crude conical abstractions (fig. 8).
An emphasis on inventive originality and humor marked the work of Harlfin-

ger’s colleague, the designer and graphic artist Minka Podhajska. Unlike
Harlfinger, who drew inspiration from historical and peasant costume, Podha-
jska favored stylized zoological and fantasy creatures, including the Krampus
figure, roaring lion, pigs, camel, and long-legged flamingos illustrated in
figure 9. Regarding such toys’ stylized manes, one reviewer jested that “they
seem proud of their coiffures . . . and rightly so.”55 Podhajska’s toy designs
were marked by their daintiness of construction and idiosyncratic use of
traditional turning methods, in comparison to the generalized bowling-pin
shapes favored by other toy designers. Clearly, then, the celebrated originality
206 West 86th V 20 N 2

195.43.22.136 on Mon, 28 Jun 2021 17:31:38 UTC
of Podhajska’s designs was rooted in the figurines’ delicate construction and
formal qualities, such as the elongated legs of the flamingos and the stylized
animal manes in figure 9, whereas Harlfinger’s toys acquired their individual
character through the careful decoration of the generalized shapes. Although
Podhajska, like Harlfinger, used the spindle lathe to make her figurines, she
glued delicate limbs and bases to them to produce sophisticated visual effects
quite atypical of traditional toys. Like the lion’s mouth shown in figure 9,
her figurines could often be moved or manipulated with strings. As Levetus
observed apropos of the spontaneity and expressivity of Podhajska’s process-
based designs, “Fräulein Podhajska never decides what animal she is going
to make till the lathe has done its work.”56 In that way, Podhajska’s design
process was related to the creative spontaneity that Hevesi praised in evaluat-
ing children’s art. 57
The same year as the Kunstschau, artistic toy designs by Harflinger, Podhajska,
and other female designers (the toys illustrated in figures 4 and 9–11) began to
be produced commercially at the Hořice (Horitz) Spielwarengenossenschaft in
northeastern Bohemia. The toy cooperative founded by the Czech pedagogue
and toy designer Jan Kysel was unique in uniting industry, design, and reform-
ist pedagogy. 58 Artists and designers from the Prague-based “Artel” art and
design union (a venture similar to the Wiener Werkstätte, of which Podhajska
was a founding member) cooperated with Viennese artists to manufacture toys
according to traditional technologies. Where the sample books of nineteenth-
century Verleger were based on uniformity and wide selection, the Hořice coop-
erative produced fewer models, but those bore the stamp of their respective
designers. Sales catalogues trumpeted the value of the trademarked designs in
awakening children’s imagination: “HOŘICE TOYS ARE NOT COMMERCIAL
JUNK. THEY ARE ARTISTIC PRODUCTS.” 59 Interestingly, although Artel
members touted the products as expressive of a particularly Czech language of
design, such claims ultimately say more about fin-de-siècle cultural nationalism
than the designs themselves.60 In spite of relatively low prices and international
marketing, the cooperative could not compete with mainstream products and
folded after World War I.61
Artistic toys like those produced by the Hořice workshops were not uni-
versally well received within the broader Art for the Child movement. Some
contemporaries believed that the alternative toys undermined the entire
project to stimulate children’s aesthetic appreciation, that their stylistic
distortions introduced children to incorrect and even contrived forms of
plastic expression. Paul Hildebrandt’s scathing indictment of artistic toys
deserves to be quoted at length:
We must be wary against nothing greater than the affected imitation of

children’s creative fantasies, which form the simplest block into a man, animal,
bench, or house. Such imitation on the part of adults is just as unbearable to
children as when one imitates their awkward childish speech. . . . The child
wants to imitate . . . but if the adult gives the child a doll or horse which is to
some extent made according to childish models, the child will willingly accept
it as sculptural humor; woe to the adult who offers children such fashionable

195.43.22.136 on Mon, 28 Jun 2021 17:31:38 UTC
toys with “holier-than-thou” pedagogical seriousness, as it could easily
come to pass that the artist could be found more preposterous than the toy,
a situation which we want to avoid.62
Hildebrandt despised the honest childlike simplicity that Lux and Hevesi prized.
For Hildebrandt, toys should play crucial roles as a sort of Kleinplastik (small
sculpture), stimulating aesthetic feelings and appreciation of good design. But,
he pleaded, shouldn’t the children, and not childish adults, be the ones taking
lessons in modern design from grown-ups? Worse, in the eyes of many, was
the fact that women were largely responsible for such childlike affectations.
In addressing deep tensions within the Art for the Child movement, critical
attitudes toward female designers’ preoccupation with the childlike ultimately
revealed broader criticisms of the Kunstschau’s Gesamtkunstwerk philosophy.
Fig. 9 (top)
Minka Podhajska, Artistic
toys, ca. 1906. Reprinted
from The Studio 38, no. 159
(June 1906): 217.
Fig. 10–11 (bottom)

Marie von Uchatius, Noah’s
Ark Animals, 1906. Reprinted
from The Studio 38, no. 159
(June 1906): 216–17.
208 West 86th V 20 N 2

195.43.22.136 on Mon, 28 Jun 2021 17:31:38 UTC
Art for the Child at the Kunstschau 1908
Showcasing works from over 170 artists and designers in a sprawling complex
of fifty-four rooms, the Kunstschau 1908 was the highpoint of the Secessionist
project of unifying art and craft in a harmonious architectural environment.
The exhibition featured sections for painting, sculpture, graphic and poster art,
architecture, garden and landscape art, theater art, funerary art, and decorative
objects. Diverse installations strove to eradicate the hierarchy of the arts, with
monumental painting and sculpture at the top and the so-called Kleinkünste
(minor arts), in which women traditionally excelled, at the bottom. Women
numbered around one-third of Kunstschau exhibitors. Putting all genres on
a level playing field in service of the beautification of utility, the Kunstschau’s
Gesamtkunstwerk philosophy applied as much to objects for and from the nursery
as to traditional painting and sculpture. As the anti-liberal Christian Social
Reichspost snidely observed about the show, “It is noteworthy that the canvas plays
a relatively small role.”63 Against such retrograde criticism, the exhibition’s
aim of cultivating the zweckmässige Schöne (functional beauty) from birth onward
represented a forceful summation of Secessionist philosophies concerning
the creative child.
Prominently positioned were the displays of children’s art—art made both

by and for children—in Rooms 4 and 29, housing, respectively, Čižek’s
Kunst des Kindes (Art of the child) and Adolf Böhm’s Kunst für das Kind (Art
for the child). Gustav Klimt declared in his opening remarks that the Kunst-
schau did not represent an artists’ union in the traditional sense but that its
adherents were dedicated to rethinking the meaning of “art” and the very
definition of “artist” to include youthful creators and a supportive commu-
nity of collectors and connoisseurs.64 Alluding to the “youth and strength”
of his colleagues later in his speech, Klimt’s words hint at the Kunstschau’s
identification with childhood. Favorable reviews suggest comparisons to the
behavior of a rebellious child, embodying “a revolutionary art against dead
commandments which feeds on insubordination, fierceness, and causing and
suffering vexation.”65 Moreover, this naughty offspring exemplified “a rever-
beration of the enthusiasm that once animated the Secession.”66 Allusions to
the Kunstschau’s youthful, spontaneous attitude were more than superficial.
Contemporary accounts underline how the Kunstschau pursued its mission
of educating visitors to bring “the arts to a harmonious cooperation with
life’s tasks” not in a “schoolmasterly” but a creative fashion and how its
organizers actively encouraged young female artists in planning meetings.67
As Hevesi observed, “The Klimt Group gathers, surrounded by their [male
and female] students from the Kunstgewerbeschule, who were also involved
in the work. At one table sat the new blood, at the other the old blood. . . .
Teacher and student shared with each other freely what was in their hearts.
Details were discussed, advice was given, examples were brought forth, tech-
nical tips were shared. Someone joked that even the adults are still young.”68
That even adults could still be young artistically was a principle that female
toymakers exploited to its fullest in gearing the Kunstschau’s didactic
philosophy toward children.

195.43.22.136 on Mon, 28 Jun 2021 17:31:38 UTC
Featuring “everything to delight a child and arouse his artistic sensibility,”
Art for the Child represented the collaborative efforts of twenty-five of Böhm’s
students.69 Hevesi cleverly compared Böhm to a “Rübezahl surrounded by his
brave gnomes . . . mostly of the female sex.”70 Here, the critic alluded to the
popular Central European folklore character Rübezahl, king of the Riesenge-
birge gnomes, who, much like the influence of Böhm on his students, appeared
in various forms in his mischievous interactions with humans. Yet unlike critics
who did not take practitioners of the art of play seriously, Hevesi stressed the
independence of the Böhm School, pointing out that artists like Harlfinger and
Podhajska (whose graphic work had been reproduced in the Secessionist jour-
nal Ver Sacrum in 1902 and 1903) had already garnered formidable international
reputations. Setting the tone for the room was the colorful decorative wooden
frieze Improvised Parade bordering the ceiling, which depicted fairy-tale char-
acters, animals, and imagined monsters (figs. 12–13). Collaboratively designed
and executed by WFA students, it was “the crown of the variegated lots in this
children’s paradise . . . contributed to by all the ladies from A to Z,” as one critic
joked. The frieze was painted using boldly contrasting and even discordant
surface patterns designed to excite children’s imaginations.71 The section visible
in figure 14 depicts a procession of banner-bearing children, fairy creatures,
and fantasy carriages connected by spiraling banners; figure 13 shows similar
children, animals, and fantasy creatures on parade. Like the invented toys that
reformers praised, composing narratives that linked these figures was left to
children, who could begin or end their invented stories at any point in the room.
Critics favorably commented on the spontaneity with which the Böhm School
created the frieze, as its title reflects. “Within the space of only four days” the
Böhm School designed it, cut it out, and painted it “in a highly playful man-
ner.”72 This emphasis on spontaneous creation relates not only to Čižek’s teach-
ing methods but to the impromptu character of the Kunstschau more broadly:
the pavilion complex was built, decorated, and organized with remarkable
speed and contemporaneity.
Art for the Child presented visitors with a colorful “overfilled children’s paradise
of toys” designed to stimulate creativity while subtly promoting adult principles
of modern design in the young.73 The bold polka-dot wall covering shown in
figure 12 served as a lively backdrop for needlework, book illustrations, artistic
toys, and dollhouses whose forms were “all derived from the triangle, square
and circle.”74 Even the conservative reviewer Karl Kuzmany conceded that “there
is truly no shortage of highly amusing inventions.”75 Primitivist wooden toys
and games were showcased throughout the room and in display cases.76 One
plaything was an inventive painted wooden chess set, designed by Harlfinger
and Podhajska and executed by the Wiener Werkstätte in 1906, whose turned
pieces were painted in a primitive fashion in contrasting colors (figs. 15–17).
The set, which was purchased by Wiener Werkstätte patrons Otto and Eugenie
Primavesi for their daughter Melitta, combined aspects of each artist’s toy
designs: Podhajska’s humor and fondness for animals and Harlfinger’s sense
of nostalgic fantasy.77 The stylized horses in figure 15 were hardly the sort of
anatomically accurate figurines that Hildebrandt advocated; yet the deliberate
distortions (particularly the awkward positioning of the lanky legs) and strong
color combinations lent the knight pieces a sense of naive energy. Likewise, the
210 West 86th V 20 N 2

:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff on Thu, 01 Jan 1976 12:34:56 UTC
Fig. 12 (top) stylized queens and rooks, shown in figures 16–17, were rendered in generalized
Works of Professor
forms characteristic of children’s drawing. Simultaneously, however, the pieces
Adolf Böhm’s class in
decorative/applied arts, suggested principles of modernist design via their geometry and the Wiener
displayed in Art for the Werkstätte square pattern bordering the painted clothing, which referenced
Child, Room 29 of the 1908
both historical costume and Secessionist reform dress. Adding further childish
Kunstschau. Reprinted
from Moderne Bauformen 7 references to the pieces was the contrasting polka-dot pattern painted on the
(1908): 384. bases and the simple, almost dreamlike rendering of turrets and onion domes
on the rooks.
Fig. 13 (bottom)
Adolf Böhm School,
Improvisierter Festzug Harlfinger’s reformist nursery suite, bristling with rectilinear and round shapes,
(Improvised parade), displayed
formed the centerpiece of the rear wall of the Art for the Child room (see figs. 12,
in Art for the Child, Room 29 of
the 1908 Kunstschau. Reprinted 14). Executed by the Viennese cabinetmaker J. Peyfuss, the maple cabinet-on-
from Moderne Bauformen 7 stand and chairs featured ebonized turned wooden spindles and stretchers with
(1908): 384.
mother-of-pearl and ebony inlays (set in an interlocking pattern of circular and
almond shapes) and nickel-bronze details. Like similar chairs by Hoffmann and
Moser, Harlfinger’s designs for the nursery suite exploited the dialogue between
constructive and decorative elements. What made Harlfinger’s design language

195.43.22.136 on Mon, 28 Jun 2021 17:31:38 UTC
distinctive was the manner in which she introduced the diagonal into otherwise
rectilinear shapes—for instance, in the obtuse angling of the back spindles, the
construction of the cross stretchers, and the cabinet’s trapezoidal shape. Such
playful deviations from strict rectilinearity, in combination with the dialogue
between the polka-dot wall covering and the rectangle-patterned carpet, inge-
niously referenced its setting in a nursery for the modern/ist creative child. Just
as the unusual diagonals are nonetheless restrained by straight lines, supervised
play in the reformist nursery encouraged creative play and fantasy within cer-
tain adult bounds. The trapezoidal cabinet-on-stand form maximized the space
for displaying artistic toys and revealed that Harlfinger truly regarded her figu-
rines as small sculptures for children—and possibly adults as well. The artist’s
Fig. 14
Fanny Harlfinger, Children’s
nursery suite and decorative
panneau (sign) “Madonna,”
displayed in Art for the
Child, Room 29 of the 1908
Kunstschau. Reprinted in
The Studio Yearbook of
Decorative Art (London: The
Studio, 1909), 8.
212 West 86th V 20 N 2

195.43.22.136 on Mon, 28 Jun 2021 17:31:38 UTC
Figs. 15–17
(clockwise, left to right)
Fanny Harlfinger and Minka
Podhajska, Wooden chess set
pieces, ca. 1906. Executed
by the Wiener Werkstätte.
Photograph © bel etage,
Wolfgang Bauer, Vienna, Austria.
design sketches, however, indicate that the toys were not merely to be looked at,
for she corrected earlier sketches in which she experimented with placing the
side shelves out of children’s reach. Like the stiffly lively wooden toys on display
(for instance, a Rococo Couple very similar to the pair illustrated in figure 6),
the nursery was designed to stimulate children’s creativity and artistic sensibil-
ity. Harlfinger’s unusual design language invited touch, play, and movement,
particularly through the device of the unusual wooden spindles. Although it is
debatable whether such designs were ultimately destined to please children’s or
parents’ eyes, Harlfinger discarded many contemporary prescriptions for the
nursery and instead created a busy and overfilled children’s paradise, which sup-
ports the idea that a child’s perspective was privileged.78

195.43.22.136 on Mon, 28 Jun 2021 17:31:38 UTC
Of all the works displayed, it was Magda Mautner-Markhof’s elaborate
dollhouse that diverged most from the progressive pedagogical philoso-
phies underlying the artistic toys. Like the Rübezahl fables, the dollhouse
presented viewers with visual tricks, which in the end raised questions as
to whether it was more important to encourage creativity in the young or
inculcate appreciation of the grown-ups’ applied-arts Gesamtkunstwerk. On
the surface, Mautner-Markhof’s Secessionist dollhouse reflected the epitome
of the Kunstschau’s ideology of functional beauty in miniature (figs. 12,
18). Its exterior and interior both contained clear references to Hoffmann’s
building projects on the Hohe Warte, a garden-city artists’ colony on the
outskirts of Vienna. The play-villa’s architectural style, in particular the
gabling, the large bay windows, the landscaping, and the terrace, quoted
the Hohe Warte’s recently completed Haus Moll (figs. 18–19). Nods toward
the rectilinear geometricity of early Wiener Werkstätte design are omnipres-
ent in the interior, which, for instance, makes use of Hoffmann’s trademark
square pattern as a decorative ceiling border (figs. 20–22) and the Werk-
stätte’s stylized-rose logo as wallpaper. In comparing the dollhouse’s black-
and-white-checkered staircase to the one in the Haus Hennenberg, it is easy Fig. 18
to forget which one is real and which one is en miniature (figs. 20–21). The Magda Mautner-Markhof,
Dollhouse, 1908. Photograph
same applies to the dollhouse’s formal dining room, painted to suggest pan- courtesy of Badisches
eled marble and black-painted pickled-oak furniture (fig. 22), which seems Landesmuseum Karlsruhe.
214 West 86th V 20 N 2

195.43.22.136 on Mon, 28 Jun 2021 17:31:38 UTC
Fig. 19
Josef Hoffmann, Haus
Moll in the Hohe Warte
Villenkolonie. Reprinted from
Das Interieur 4 (1903): 123.
to have been loosely inspired by the dining room in the Palais Stoclet (the
important 1905–11 Wiener Werkstätte commission in Brussels). Here we see
an artifice similar to that railed against by critics of the lifelike doll: decep-
tive imitations of nature may dazzle the child but, equally, will eventually
bore the child.79 Although there are minimal concessions to children’s way
of seeing in the overall simplification of form, the dollhouse prioritizes the
adult way of seeing—in this case, by presenting to children ideas of modern
architecture and the way to live artistically.
Contemporary critics were not sure what to make of the dollhouse’s refer-
ences to Hoffmann and the Werkstätte. Hevesi gently poked fun at the
completeness of its interiors, declaring that modern dolls were so demanding
that only residences furnished “right down to the last little piece of furniture
and . . . even complete with garden[s]” would satisfy them. “A wealthy, mod-
ernist doll who has recently married can hardly wish for a more comfortable
or more intelligent home. Ready to move in immediately; I believe only the
bed and table linens need to be woven.”80 Other critics were less generous.
Kuzmany read the dollhouse as a caricature of modernist interior design.
Yet he was off the mark, for what he framed as a humorous effort to plant
aesthetic appreciation of everyday objects in young children was something
its creator took very seriously. Like Rübezahl’s legendary interactions with
humans, which were ridden with contradictions but generally benevolent,
Mautner-Markhof’s dollhouse reflected reformist impulses. Its form was
outwardly modernist, and, indeed, its design placed minimal emphasis on
conditioning girls for the future role of housewife. Totally absent from the
dollhouse were elaborate miniature domestic gadgets, described in Hildeb-
randt’s Das Spielzeug im Leben des Kindes, that would instill motherly and
housewifely duties in girls. Moreover, unlike most high-art dollhouses, none
of the play-villa’s interior spaces was clearly defined as a particular model
room. The simple geometric furniture was largely interchangeable among

195.43.22.136 on Mon, 28 Jun 2021 17:31:38 UTC
all of the rooms, permitting the child to redecorate at will. If Mautner-
Markhof’s dollhouse promoted any future vocation, it was that of a Klimtian
Lebenskünstlerin (connoisseur), who appreciated good art and interior design
in her daily life. Yet, like similar dollhouses from previous centuries reviewed
in Kind und Kunst, its perfect, self-contained design, which replicated the
Secessionist worldview in miniature, differed little from that of the mass-
produced toys that reformers so ridiculed. The opposite of the invented toy
that was animated only by the child’s imagination, the dollhouse left little
room for a child’s fantasy. Surely, one reviewer reasoned, children would pre-
fer a “normal doll” over ornate mansions that could be touched only under
close supervision.81 As with similarly elaborate dollhouses over the centuries,
Mautner-Markhof’s dollhouse would seem to have been designed to suit the
artistic pretensions of adults rather than children.
Fig. 20 (left)
Magda Mautner-Markhof,
Dollhouse: interior staircase.
Badisches Landesmuseum
Karlsruhe.
Fig. 21 (right)
Josef Hoffmann, Haus
Hennenberg in the Hohe Warte
Villenkolonie: service staircase.
Reprinted from Das Interieur 4
(1903): 131.
216 West 86th V 20 N 2

195.43.22.136 on Mon, 28 Jun 2021 17:31:38 UTC
Through such visual riddles, the gendered nexus between women and chil-
dren, and between the adult and the childlike, laid bare critics’ appraisals of
the Kunstschau’s philosophy of functional beauty. Although work by Čižek’s
students was displayed near the front of the Kunstschau, as if to reorient visitors’
aesthetic experience, conservative critics continued to denigrate the childish
aesthetics of artistic toys and to question the artistic value of such works. Like
Hildebrandt, commentators polemicized against sophisticated affectations of
the childlike, shedding doubt on “whether children would even understand
this violent stylization into the simple and provincial.”82 Tacked onto such
sentiments were fears about craft’s encroachments into the high temple of art.
Adalbert Seligmann, a reactionary critic and feuilletonist for the liberal daily
Neue Freie Presse, attacked the exhibition’s low standards of art. “Apparently,” he
wrote, “it was the idea of the exhibition’s organizers not to offer an exhibition
of art works, but rather an exhibition of all possible things that can be made in
artistic ways, from artistic standpoints . . . [including] picture books for chil-
dren and decorative symbolism for grown-ups, sometimes even ‘only for grown-
ups.’”83 Alluding to the Kunstschau’s pluralistic rendition of the Gesamtkunstwerk,
another conservative journalist joked that his review could not possibly cover
the whole decorative-arts “warehouse.”84
Reviews of Art for the Child thus revealed critics’ broader attitudes toward con-
temporary art and design. Reactionaries used the idea of children’s art and
female “craftiness” to belittle the Klimt Group’s pretensions. Though acknowl-
edging the “astounding success of his [Čižek’s] instructional methods,” Selig-
mann remained skeptical about the aesthetic value of children’s art and the
appreciation that young people could accord female designers’ sophisticated
Fig. 22
Magda Mautner-Markhof,
Dollhouse dining room.
Badisches Landesmuseum
Karlsruhe.

195.43.22.136 on Mon, 28 Jun 2021 17:31:38 UTC
design language. While progressive critics like Lux praised the connection
of children’s art to primitive folk art—with “the childhood of nations and
the childhood of art repeating atavistically in every human life”—Seligmann
harnessed children’s art to trample on the primitive impulse in modernist art
and design.85 Seligmann maintained that “the similarity of these pictures to
the products of our artistically naive, archaizing painters and interior artists
[Raumkünstler] proves nothing, for such works’ actual artistic value but shows,
at most, how childish are the works of many grown-ups who want to be taken
seriously nowadays.”86 The conservative Kuzmany took up a similar position.
Though pointing to the pedagogical value of Čižek’s methods, Kuzmany argued
that the “artistic value” of Čižek’s students’ work “is to be sharply differentiated
from their pedagogical value.” He likewise found little value in the “female
handicrafts.”87 Whether from the hands of women or children, conservative
critics rejected primitive child art, and modernist commentators praised it, for
similar reasons.
Modernist critics took a generally more positive attitude toward art by and
for children but nonetheless declaimed the limits of women’s inclusion in the
Secessionist Gesamtkunstwerk. In a review in Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, Lux
praised “art at the source of life” as representing the same sort of pure, naive
impulses of folk art showcased in ethnographic museums.88 Lux proceeded to
applaud Čižek for trying to “preserve the primordial . . . artist, mostly suffo-
cated in the schools,” not because his effort would further specific vocational
purposes but because it would heighten general levels of artistic taste and
appreciation in the populace at large.89 Lux’s words convey a message similar
to Leisching’s, written a few years earlier in Kind und Kunst: “A certain type
of artist lies hidden in every child. For isn’t play nothing but art?” 90 Lux,
however, argued further that this project of cultivating the artist in every
child—even those not wanting to practice art vocationally—and promoting a
Klimtian beautification of everyday life was fulfilled in a most exemplary fash-
ion by Adolf Böhm and his pupils. Both women and children, Lux argued,
precisely because of their exclusion from the larger art world and because
of their lack of training, had a certain “inexpressible something” reflect-
ing “pure self-expression” that no amount of proper training could trump.91
Böhm, in fact, by prioritizing his students’ work over his own, was found to
be rather like Čižek in pouring his creative energies into teaching.
We can now return to the questions posed at the beginning of this article.
Were the Vienna Moderns willing to concede that not only children but also
women had lessons to teach the male Secessionists? Moreover, were Seces-
sionist toys truly designed with children in mind? Let us venture, by way of
conclusion, to Gustav Klimt’s Stammtisch (regular table) at the Café Museum
in 1896, a full twelve years before the Kunstschau, as tensions were rising
between the insubordinate Klimt Group and the conservative artists’ guild.
In thumbing through folders of children’s drawings like those illustrated
in figure 1 with his table companions Otto Wagner, Josef Olbrich, Koloman
Moser, and Felician von Myrbach, Klimt abruptly declared, “Gentleman,
let’s give up painting. The children do it much better!” 92 Playing on the
group’s pariah status, Klimt’s lighthearted joke reveals the seriousness of
218 West 86th V 20 N 2

195.43.22.136 on Mon, 28 Jun 2021 17:31:38 UTC
the Viennese avant-garde’s interest in a form of authentic expression
untainted by the stagnation that Klimt and his followers believed asphyx-
iated the adjacent Künstlerhaus (artists’ guild), and the Academy of Fine
Arts. Equally important to the manner in which the Klimt Group’s “discovery”
of children’s art paralleled formal developments in their own work was a
broader metaphor of cultural renewal; in this regard, the Kunstschau’s artis-
tic toys were hardly child’s play. Yet even as the Klimt Group took inclusive
attitudes toward reevaluating the work of “primitive” outsiders like women
and children, statements that “women do it much better” seemed far less
likely to take root in the popular and critical imagination. At precisely a time
when women artists and designers were penetrating male artistic institutions
in unprecedented numbers, a stress on female difference and women’s
psychologically primitive state represented a convenient method of neutral-
izing their threat to the gendered hierarchy of art and craft.93
Ironically, it was the art of children that received more attention than female
designers’ work in Art for the Child, both from contemporary commentators and
in the subsequent historiographical literature.94 Even as Lux celebrated the
primitivist impulses in the untutored art of the child, he infantilized the female
designers of Art for the Child and cast them as simpleminded dilettantes. “I would
like to term these artistically minded girls as working amateurs, who are in a
similar, if also more developed, phase of studies as the child whose primitive
calling to art has been shown so comprehensively and convincingly by Čižek.” 95
Female designers were accepted in the Kunstschau insofar as they did not push
the boundaries of women’s domestic sphere and women’s “natural” connection
to craft too far. That many reviews glossed over Art for the Child altogether also
reveals the attitude that artistic toys were not as important to the general public
as works on canvas. Thus, even as the Kunstschau raised a banner in support of
youth and functional beauty, trivializing notions of the inferiority of the female
handicrafts prevailed.
Assessed in terms of objects conceived with the eyes of a child, avant-garde

Kinderkunst (children’s art) and Frauenkunst (women’s art) in fin-de-siècle
Vienna overlapped in ways that were both predictable and surprising. Because
of women’s natural connection to child rearing, female artists were perceived as
ideal designers of objects intended to stimulate children’s creativity. What was
telling about critical reactions to Art for the Child was the discursive similarity
of children’s art and women’s art in the eyes of both progressive and conserva-
tive critics. Whereas progressive critics tended to prize the primitive rawness of
children’s art and its deliberate stylization in artistic toys, conservative crit-
ics feared such qualities precisely because they undermined the institutional
structure of academic training through which male artists had progressed over
the centuries. Undermining academic training and the traditional hierarchy of
the arts created a broad threat. Suddenly, traditional artistic outsiders—female
students at the WFA and the KGS and Čižek’s young pupils—had become insid-
ers, a situation that deeply troubled observers who questioned the appropriate-
ness of the cultivation of “childish” impulses over proper adult models. In his
landmark history of toys, Gröber observed that the realm of child’s play was a
world that could never be fully comprehended by adults. “An adult’s fantasy,” he

195.43.22.136 on Mon, 28 Jun 2021 17:31:38 UTC
wrote, “cannot begin to follow the richness of the tales hidden behind the heart
of every child.” 96 At the Kunstschau 1908, precisely the opposite was true. Critics
questioned whether such sophisticated salon toys were meant for children in the
first place. Rather, the fantasy of adults took free rein in using raw materials to
create artistic toys, dollhouses, and furniture to stimulate children’s creativity.
The rest was left to children’s imagination.
Megan Brandow-Faller
Megan Brandow-Faller, assistant professor of history at the City University of New York/
Kingsborough, completed her PhD in cultural history at Georgetown University. Her cur-
rent book manuscript examines Vienna’s “Female Secession,” a movement provocatively
reclaiming the stereotypes surrounding “women’s art” and carrying the Klimt Group’s
spiritual legacy into the interwar years. Her most recent publications deal with the inter-
war expressionist ceramics of the Wiener Werkstätte.
The author is grateful to the Friends of the Princeton Library for a summer 2012 research grant,
which underwrote much of the research that went into this article, as well as a PSC–CUNY Research
Award. Special thanks to Andrea Immel and Aaron Pickett of the Cotsen Children’s Library at
Princeton University, a generous private collector in Vienna, Heidrun Jecht at the Badisches
Landesmuseum Karlsruhe, and the anonymous readers who commented on earlier drafts of this
article.
1 Robert Goldwater’s pioneering study of primitivism and modernism (originally published in

1938) suggests that critical attitudes toward the “affinity of large sections of modern painting to
children’s art” reveal much about the judgment of modernist innovations. Overall, Goldwater insists
that, despite primitive and childish influences, artists like Paul Klee filtered the childlike through
a sophisticated adult eye. Robert Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1986), xix. On a more humorous level, see also J. Glaves Smith, A Child of Six Could
Do It: Cartoons about Modern Art (London: Tate Gallery, 1973).
2 On the influence of art created with the innocent eyes of children on avant-garde painting, the
work of art historian Jonathan Fineberg has been pioneering. See Jonathan Fineberg, Discovering
Child Art: Essays on Childhood, Primitivism, and Modernism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1998); Fineberg, The Innocent Eye: Children’s Art and the Modern Artist (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1997); and Fineberg, When We Were Young: New Perspectives on the Art of the Child
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
3 Max Burckhardt, Ver Sacrum 1, no. 1 (1899): 3. Carl Schorske famously likened fin-de-siècle Vienna’s
cultural efflorescence to a “collective Oedipal revolt” by the disillusioned sons of liberalism. In the
annals of Viennese cultural history, 1897 marks the founding of the Vienna Secession, whereby
Gustav Klimt, in response to the stifling “market hall” commercial policies of the conservative artists’
guild (Künstlerhaus), founded a new league dedicated to creative freedom, originality, integrity,
and artistic timeliness while encompassing a variety of aesthetic styles. The Viennese Secessionists’
motto (“To the Age Its Art / To Art Its Freedom”), emblazoned upon their building’s simple white
façade, exemplified this philosophy of creative freedom and contemporaneousness. In a chapter on
the younger generation of Viennese modernists, Schorske noted that Čižek and fellow Kunstschau
adherents showed “special concern for the child as artist” and that children’s art enjoyed “pride of
place in Kunstschau 1908.” Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Knopf,
1979), 327.
4 For instance, the Swiss German artist Paul Klee urged readers of The Blue Rider not to laugh at the
“primitive beginnings in art, such as one usually finds in ethnographic collections or at home in one’s
nursery.” It was all “to be taken very seriously when it comes to reforming today’s art.” Quoted in
Colin Rhodes, Primitivism and Modern Art (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1994), 56.
5 Popular stereotypes of women’s art in Vienna in 1900 related to notions of dilettantish, amateurish
works intended as distraction rather than produced by vocation and, above all, to the idea that the
so-called weibliche Handarbeiten (female handicrafts) were more reproductive than creative.
6 As Sherwin Simmons argued on the confluence of gendered ornamentation and the primitive, “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
220 West 86th V 20 N 2

195.43.22.136 on Mon, 28 Jun 2021 17:31:38 UTC
1905 and 1908.” Sherwin Simmons, “Ornament, Gender and Interiority in Viennese Expressionism,”
Modernism/Modernity 8, no. 2 (2001): 247. Other than in Traude Hansen’s Kinderspiel und Jugendstil in
Wien 1900, Secessionist toys have been remarkably understudied in the Austrian context. A notable
exception to the historiographical neglect is the work of Pavel Jirásek in German and Czech. In the
context of Wilhelmine Germany, the groundbreaking studies of Bryan Ganaway and David Hamlin
are more concerned with questions of consumption than art or design, although both authors
explore aspects of the so-called reformist Dresdener Spielzeuge. See Bryan Ganaway, Toys, Consumption
and Middle Class Childhood in Imperial Germany (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009); and David Hamlin, Work
and Play: The Production and Consumption of Toys in Germany, 1870–1914 (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2007).
7 Juliet Kinchin, “Hide and Seek: Remapping Modern Design and Childhood,” in Century of the Child:
Growing by Design (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012), 17. Kinchin observes that the conflation
of primitivism, the childlike, and the feminine could often be used to trivialize or infantilize female
designers’ work, and the discourse held considerable sway among conservative Viennese critics.
Founded in 1897, with the name Kunstschule für Frauen u. Mädchen (Art School for Women and
Girls), as a remedy to women’s exclusion from the Austrian Academy of Fine Arts, the institution is
referred to throughout this article for the sake of ease and clarity as the Wiener Frauenakademie
(as it was renamed in 1925). It was commonly called the Frauenakademie even before the name
change was officially approved; its redesignation as an academy was closely connected to the state’s
accreditation of its courses in academic painting and sculpture in 1918/19.
8 Here I paraphrase the main theme in Julius Leisching’s article on artistic toys in the inaugural
issue of the progressive journal Kind und Kunst. As director of the Imperial Museum of Applied Arts
in Brünn (Brno), Moravia, Leisching was a major propagandist for artistic toys and for the Art for
the Child movement more broadly. Julius Leisching, “Künstlerisches Spielzeug,” Kind und Kunst 1
(1904–5): 225–29.
9 Joseph August Lux, “Vom Spielzeug,” Der Kunstwart 21, no. 6 (December 1905): 425.
10 In part, my article builds on recent scholarship on the 1908 Kunstschau. See the catalogue to
the recent Belvedere exhibition, Gustav Klimt und die Kunstschau 1908, ed. Agnes von Husslein-Arco
and Alfred Weidinger (Vienna: Prestel, 2008), for two essays related to the theme of children’s art
and artistic toys: Rolf Laven, “‘First Class: Werke der Čižek’schen Jugendkunstklasse auf der Wiener
Kunstschau 1908,” 78–84; and Pavel Jirásek, “Künstlerisches Spielzeug,” 364–71.
11 Though rooted in the Klimt Group’s philosophies on the integrality of art, architecture, and
design in a unified stylistic whole, the reasons for the group’s split also reflected economic tensions
between the progressive Stilkünstler (Klimt Group) and the conservative Nur-Maler (or rump
Secessionists led by Josef Engelhardt). Conservative Secessionists resented progressive members’
growing commercial affiliations with the Galerie Miethke (of which Carl Moll was artistic
director from 1904 on) and the Wiener Werkstätte, which they believed had co-opted the original
Secessionist spirit.
12 What Amy Ogata has recently argued in the context of postwar American toy design finds parallels
in Secessionist toys: “The role of design in stimulating creativity, while ostensibly aimed at children,
was always intended for adults.” Amy Ogata, “Creative Playthings: Educational Toys and Postwar
American Culture,” Winterthur Portfolio 39, nos. 2–3 (2004): 129–56. In this regard, as one critic
said upon assessing whether Secessionist toys were truly for children or for adults, “The decision of
whether these modern toys are modern in the full sense of the word . . . belongs to the little ones.”
K. Chotek, Dílo 6, no. 4 (1908): 89. I am grateful to Suzanna Halsey (Czechmatters.com) for her help
with the Czech sources; all translations from the Czech are hers.
13 Fineberg, When We Were Young, 210.
14 Although a great deal of scholarly ink has been devoted to Čižek’s role in art education, his
reforms are rarely considered in the broader context of Viennese modern art and design. See, for
instance, the recent essay by Rolf Laven, “‘First Class,’” which summarizes findings in his longer
work, Franz Čižek und die Wiener Jugendkunst (Vienna: Schlebrügge, 2006). The standard work
remains the catalogue Franz Čižek: Pionier der Kunsterziehung (Vienna: Museum der Stadt Wien, 1985).
Traditionally, interpretations of Čižek have been mediated by the publications of his disciples. See,
for instance, Wilhelm Viola, Child Art and Franz Čižek (Vienna: Austrian Junior Red Cross, 1936);
Francesca Wilson, The Child as Artist: Some Conversations with Professor Čižek (London: Children’s Art
Exhibition Fund, 1921); and also Leopold W. Rochowanski, Dreissig Jahre Jugendkunst (Troppau: Heinz,
1928); Rochowanski, Die Wiener Jugendkunst: Franz Čižek und seine Pflegestätte (Vienna: Wilhelm Frick
Verlag, 1946).
15 Viola, Child Art and Franz Čižek, 35.
16 Laven, “‘First Class,’” 78.
17 Čižek’s follower Wilhelm Viola described Austrian primary schools’ traditional “connect the dots”
methods in retrospect: “At seven years of age the pupils were given books with dotted pages; these
dots were to be connected with straight lines. The older children were given drawing books with
the dots further apart. Later on designs were copied from the blackboard. To draw something from

195.43.22.136 on Mon, 28 Jun 2021 17:31:38 UTC
imagination, even to draw from nature, was never thought of. Those over thirteen were expected
to copy plaster models and printed designs, the ideal being to train the child to copy exactly. It was
training in skill without any regard for creative work.” Viola, Child Art and Franz Čižek, 14.
18 “The teacher ought to learn to hover like an invisible spirit over his pupil, always ready to
encourage but never to press or force.” Francesca Wilson, A Lecture by Professor Čizek (London:
Children’s Art Exhibition Fund, 1921), 2.
19 Complicating the problem of the adult stylization of childlike aesthetics in Vienna in 1900 is
the contested notion of a definable Čižek style influenced by contemporary art and design. Stuart
MacDonald has raised the issue of the apparent paradox of Čižek’s child-centered “creative island”
theories, arguing that Čižek’s followers were “so carried away by Čižek’s philosophy of self-activity
and free-expression that they blinded themselves to the firm methods he used with his pupils.” Stuart
MacDonald, The History and Philosophy of Art Education (New York: American Elsevier, 1970), 345.
Similarly, former Čižek pupil Ruth Kalmar Wilson has admitted that the Čižek School may have,
albeit unconsciously, imitated the Secessionstil that had pervaded everyday life. As Kalmar Wilson has
reasoned, this dialogue between the adult and the childlike gave her “the feeling of growing up with
the avant-garde.” Peter Smith, “Franz Čižek: The Patriarch,” Art Education 38, no. 2 (March 1985): 30.
20 Viola, Child Art and Franz Čižek, 12–13.
21 Ludwig Hevesi, “Das Kind als Künstler,” in Altkunst-Neukunst: Wien 1894–1908 (Vienna: Carl
Konegen, 1909), 29.
22 Adolf Loos, “Ornament und Erziehung,” in Trotzdem: Gesammelte Schriften, 1900–1930 (Vienna:
Prachner, 1982), 173.
23 Loos famously declared that “wherever I abuse the object of everyday life by ornamenting it, I
shorten its lifespan because ornament is subject to fashion and must die earlier. Only the moods and
ambition of woman can be responsible for this murder of material—because ornament lives eternally
in the service of woman.” Ibid., 177. See also Adolf Loos, “Ornament und Verbrechen,” in Trotzdem:
Gesammelte Schriften, 1900–1930 (Vienna: Prachner, 1982), 78–88. In the period after the Kunstschau
1908, Loos’s patronage was decisive in steering the young Oskar Kokoschka toward portraiture and
away from his training in the applied arts and the folk-art primitivism that exemplified his work The
Dreaming Youths (1907). Simmons, “Ornament, Gender and Interiority in Viennese Expressionism,”
256.
24 Hevesi, “Das Kind als Künstler,” 450.
25 Ibid., 451.
26 Ibid.
27 Wilson, Lecture by Professor Čižek, 21.
28 For instance, as the Austrian ethnographer Michael Haberlandt wrote, “From a scientific point
of view . . . our ancient civilization may be studied in its still extant survivals and because here one
may win back truths and ideas which amid the complex developments of higher artistic practice have
to a great extent been lost sight of. Educated people have something to learn from the restraint and
sobriety of peasant art. The lesson it teaches is that . . . the spirit should animate us in our work and
inspire in us a sincere and honest devotion to even the smallest labor of our hands. Our art should
be as deeply rooted in our lives as peasant art is in the lives of the people.” Michael Haberlandt,
“Austrian Peasant Art,” in Peasant Art in Austria and Hungary, ed. C. M. Holme (London: Studio, 1911),
30.
29 Alice Leeds explains this phenomenon of discursive otherness apropos of women and children:
“The new disciplines of biology, psychology, anthropology, and so forth, brought with them a tendency
to exaggerate the differences between the studying subject [the educated Caucasian male] and
the object of his study: animals, children, women and tribal populations, all of whom were equated
in their ‘otherness.’” Alice Leeds, “The History of Attitudes towards Children’s Art,” Studies in Art
Education 30, no. 2 (1989): 95.
30 Viola, Child Art and Franz Čižek, 37–38.
31 Rebecca Houze, “From Wiener Kunst im Hause to the Wiener Werkstätte: Marketing Domesticity
with Fashionable Interior Design,” Design Issues 18, no. 1 (2002): 6.
32 In an essay on Alma Buscher’s Bauspiel Schiff, Christine Mehring has remarked that “we routinely
see buildings . . . as expressions of their time” while “children’s games remain relegated to history’s
wastebin.” Christine Mehring, “Alma Buscher ‘Ship’ Building Toy 1923,” in Bauhaus, 1919–1933:
Workshops for Modernity, ed. Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman (New York: Museum of Modern Art,
2009), 156. See also Kinchin, “Hide and Seek.”
33 In a favorable review of Karl Gröber’s history of toys, Walter Benjamin observed that “one found
carved wooden animals at the turner’s, tin soldiers at the tin and copper founder’s . . . [and] wax dolls
at the candle maker’s.” Walter Benjamin, “Kulturgeschichte des Spielzeugs,” Gesammelte Schriften, vol.
3 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972), 114.
34 Amelia Sara Levetus, “Modern Viennese Toys,” The Studio 37, no. 159 (June 1906): 213–18.
Levetus’s insinuation that toymaking was better suited to women rather than “greats” like Hoffmann
and Moser is echoed in Kinchin’s arguments that male artists’ engagement with children’s creativity
was “often treated as a sideline or aberration” from “serious” work. Kinchin, “Hide and Seek,” 16.
222 West 86th V 20 N 2

195.43.22.136 on Mon, 28 Jun 2021 17:31:38 UTC
35 Levetus, “Modern Viennese Toys,” 214, 219.
36 Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1981), 50.
37 In the words of toy historian Karl Gröber, nineteenth-century production methods transformed
“the craftsman into a factory worker and . . . robbed the individual face that made all old toys so
charming.” Karl Gröber, Kinderspielzeug aus aller Zeit: Eine Geschichte des Spielzeugs (Berlin: Deutscher
Kunstverlag, 1928), 63.
38 Karl Fritzsch describes how the advent of lathe-turning techniques made the Erzgebirge figurines
“very stereotyped.” He adds that “constant adaptation to changing fashions lays too heavy a burden
on the turner, who prefers to limit the extra carving work to a minimum.” Karl Ewald Fritzsch and
Manfred Bachmann, An Illustrated History of Toys, trans. Ruth Michaelis-Jena (London: Abbey Library,
1966), 63. The static nature of the toys’ forms also related to the necessity for village manufacturers to
bring their products in line with the prototypes illustrated in the Verleger’s catalogues.
39 Lux, “Vom Spielzeug,” 425.
40 Ibid., 426.
41 Leisching, “Künstlerisches Spielzeug,” 226.
42 Paul Hildebrandt, Das Spielzeug im Leben des Kindes (Berlin: Söhlke Nachfolger, 1904), 309–10.
43 Chotek, Dílo, 87–88.
44 Bryan Ganaway argues that in the context of Wilhemine Germany, German toy manufacturers like
Märklin “worked hard to make exact miniaturizations of cookie cutters, casserole dishes, silverware
and coal shovels so that girls could imitate their mothers exactly in the Kinderstube [nursery].” Bryan
Ganaway, Toys, Consumption, and Middle-Class Childhood in Imperial Germany, 1871–1918 (Oxford: Peter
Lang, 2009), 63.
45 Lux, “Vom Spielzeug,” 424.
46 Ibid., 425.
47 See, for instance, Konrad Lange, “Kunst und Spiel in ihrer erzieherischen Bedeutung,” parts 1 and
2, Kind und Kunst 1, no. 2 (October 1904): 1–11; Lange, “Die Puppe als Spielzeug für das Kind,” Kind
und Kunst 1, no. 2 (November 1904): 61–66; 1, no. 3 (December 1904): 101–4. Similar observations
were made by Čižek, in that he preferred teaching less prosperous rural children over sophisticated
urban children precisely because the former were less spoiled by influences from the adult world that
robbed them of their innate creativity.
48 See Amelia Sara Levetus, “The Imperial Arts and Crafts Schools, Vienna,” The Studio 39, no. 166
(January 1907): 324. For a more detailed discussion of KGS’s modernist teaching philosophies, see
Gottfried Fliedl, Kunst und Lehre am Beginn der Moderne: Die Wiener Kunstgewerbeschule, 1867–1918
(Salzburg: Residenz Verlag, 1986). The KGS’s admittance policies toward female students fluctuated
over the course of the nineteenth century. Founded in 1866 on the South Kensington model of
applied-arts instruction, it admitted female students from the outset because of women’s “natural”
connection to the decorative arts. KGS director Rudolf von Eitelberger recalled that “from the very
beginning it was clear to the leading circles of the Museum School that its halls must be open to
members of the female sex who have dedicated themselves to the applied arts.” Although the school
imposed a moratorium on accepting new female pupils in its General Division in 1886 owing to
fears about hyper-feminization of the institution—which created a breeding ground for dilettantism
in the eyes of the school’s board of directors—such repressive polices were wiped away by the
Secessionist coup led by Felician von Myrbach that took charge of the institution in 1899. (Myrbach
was also a founding member of the Secession as well as a member of the Klimt Group, which broke
away from the Secession in 1905.) With Myrbach’s appointment as KGS director in 1899 came
the installation of a committed band of teachers, including Josef Hoffmann (architecture), Koloman
Moser (decorative painting and drawing), Alfred Roller (General Division), Carl Otto
Czeschka (General Division, painting and drawing), and Franz Barwig (woodcarving and
sculpture workshops).
49 For instance, in its January 1906 issue, Kind und Kunst devoted a richly illustrated twenty-three-
page article to Wiener Werkstätte items for children, including toy designs by Hoffmann, Moser,
Czeschka, Harlfinger, and Podhajska.
51 Ibid.
52 See Ludwig Hevesi, “Von der Klimt Gruppe,” in Altkunst-Neukunst: Wien 1894–1908 (Vienna: Carl
Konegen, 1909), 308–11.
53 Levetus, “Modern Viennese Toys,” 218.
54 Marianne Roller was the sister of Alfred Roller, KGS director and court opera set designer. A brief
biography can be found in Husslein-Arco and Weidinger, eds., Gustav Klimt und die Kunstschau 1908,
546.
55 “Wiener Werkstätte,” Kind und Kunst 3, no. 4 (January 1906): 125.
56 Levetus, “Modern Viennese Toys,” 218.
57 Although lathe turning was predominant at the Kunstschau, other female toymakers devised
new methods of manufacture. The “Brettlein” or “little board” method of carpentry construction

195.43.22.136 on Mon, 28 Jun 2021 17:31:38 UTC
was pioneered by the designer and illustrator Mizzi von Uchatius. A protégée of KGS professors
Myrbach and Czeschka, the latter of whose toys were also shown at the Kunstschau, Uchatius crafted
her animal figurines using three pieces of flat wood cemented together, using multiple layers for
larger figures whose limbs could be moved and manipulated. Uchatius, who was later commissioned
to teach modern toymaking techniques at the imperial craft school in St. Ulrich in the Grödnertal,
based her designs on a conscientious study of nature. She designed and executed a modern Noah’s
ark, which took first prize in a competition sponsored by the Nuremberg School of Applied Art, after
months of meticulous study of animal movement in the Schönbrunn Zoo and the local circus (see
figs. 10–11). Although Uchatius’s toys resemble real animals, however, there is no effort at three-
dimensional deception, for the stylized figurines are unabashedly stiff and flat. Uchatius’s simple
methods of construction led to her interest in spreading new methods of construction in the Austrian
Fachschulen for woodworking. Levetus, “Modern Viennese Toys,” 218.
58 Hana Dvoráková, “Ist das böhmische Spielzeug tatsächlich böhmisch?,” Acta Ethnographica
Hungarica 44, no. 2 (July 2000): 232.
59 Jan Pávek, Obrázkový Vzorník Hořických Hraček (Hořice, 1909), 3.
60 Hana Dvoráková has highlighted the irony of such toys’ supposed “Czechness,” as toy production
did not begin in Bohemia and Moravia until after 1825 and the toys were largely based on
standardized German and Austrian models. See Hana Dvoráková, “Ist das böhmische Spielzeug
tatsächlich böhmisch?”
61 While contemporary periodicals report that the Hořice toys were well received at international
exhibitions and were coveted by English collectors (the toys were marketed via sales inserts in The
Studio), few Hořice toys have surfaced in public collections. Their prices averaged around fifty hellers;
more elaborate models cost from one to two crowns.
62 Hildebrandt, Das Spielzeug im Leben des Kindes, 330–31.
63 “Kunstschau Wien 1908,” Reichspost, June 2, 1908, 7.
64 Klimt maintained that he and his colleagues were “united by the conviction that no area of
human life is too insignificant or low to give space to artistic strivings, that, to speak in the words of
Morris, even the most unimposing thing when perfectly executed can help to increase the beauty of
this earth.” “Gustav Klimts Rede bei der Eröffnung der Ausstellung,” in Katalog der Kunstschau 1908
(Vienna: Holzhausen, 1908), 3.
65 Ludwig Hevesi, “Kunstschau 1908,” in Altkunst-Neukunst: Wien 1894–1908 (Vienna: Carl Konegen,
1909), 311.
66 Hevesi, “Von der Klimt Gruppe,” 309.
67 Josef August Lux, “Kunstschau Wien 1908,” Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration 23 (October 1908): 36.
68 Hevesi, “Von der Klimt Gruppe,” 309. Emphasis added.
69 Amelia Sara Levetus, “Studio Talk—Vienna,” The International Studio 35, no. 140 (October 1908):
312; Katalog der Kunstschau 1908 (Vienna, 1908). Participating students included: Marianne Adler,
Olga Ambros, Helene Bernatzik, Maria Vera Brunner, Marianne Deutsch, Mizi Friedmann, Fanny
Harlfinger-Zakucka, Luise Horovitz, Ella Irányi, Johanna Kaserer, Frieda Löw, Magda Mautner von
Markhof, Marianne Perlmutter, Minka Podhajska, Maria Pranke, Margarete von Remiz, Elsa Seuffert,
Selma Singer, Marianne Steinberger, Paula Westhauser, Marianne Wieser, Elisabeth von Wolter,
Marianne Zels, and Eva Zetter.
70 Hevesi, “Kunstschau 1908,” 314.
71 Karl Kuzmany, “Kunstschau Wien 1908,” Die Kunst 17 (October 1908): 534.
72 Hevesi, “Kunstschau 1908,” 314–15.
73 Reichspost, June 2, 1908, 7.
75 Kuzmany, “Kunstschau Wien 1908,” 534.
76 As the whereabouts of many of the Art for the Child works (particularly the smaller turned wooden
toys) are unknown, I focus on objects that have been clearly depicted in historical periodicals or are
available today for study and analysis. If, indeed, the toys fulfilled their design purpose of stimulating
children’s creativity, then it is telling that very few were meticulously preserved: they were apparently
consumed and destroyed by children.
77 Likewise reflecting an adult fascination with the childlike, Klimt’s portrait of Melitta’s older sister,
Mäda Primavesi (1912, in the Metropolitian Museum of Art), was the painter’s only commissioned
portrait of a child. Its bold composition, contrasting the playfulness of the background with the
unsentimental bearing of its unusually precocious nine-year-old sitter, represents an innovative
example of the genre. It is notable that the Secessionist chess set was purchased well before the
Primavesis became main financial backers of the Werkstätte in its later phases, from 1915 until
the couple’s 1925 separation, at which point Otto (who died the next year) transferred his shares
to Eugenia. The couple’s differing philosophies on the Werkstätte’s artistic and economic future
contributed significantly to the separation.
78 Harlfinger’s original design language earned her widespread press coverage in English- and
German-language periodicals and underscored her versatility in the applied arts and interior design.
Levetus commented that, for Harlfinger, toy and furniture making were complementary practices, as
224 West 86th V 20 N 2

195.43.22.136 on Mon, 28 Jun 2021 17:31:38 UTC
in Gröber’s golden age of toys. “Frau Harlfinger-Zakucka is already known to readers of The Studio
as a designer and maker of artistic toys . . . but is a many-sided woman as her work at large will show.”
Levetus, “Studio Talk,” The Studio 54, no. 223 (October 1911): 67. See also The Studio Yearbook of
Decorative Art, 1909 (London: The Studio, 1909), 6.
79 Otto Schulze Köln “Neue Spielsachen für unsere Kleinen,” Kind und Kunst 3, no. 1 (October
1905): 19–21.
81 “Die Puppe als Spielzeug für das Kind,” Kind und Kunst 1, no. 3 (December 1904): 101. According
to the reviewer, elaborate dollhouses were always a “mixed pleasure” to children, for they were not
really allowed to play with them to their hearts’ content.
83 Adalbert Franz Seligmann, “Die Kunstschau 1908,” Neue Freie Presse, June 2, 1908, 13.
83 Ibid.
84 Sabine Plakolm-Forsthuber, Moderne Raumkunst (Vienna: Picus, 1991), 132. In contrast to the well-
known Beethoven exhibition (1902) at the peak of the Secession’s “heroic years” (featuring a design
scheme in which individual elements were subjugated to the whole in favor of rigid programmatic
unity), the Kunstschau 1908 embodied a pluralistic version of the Gesamtkunstwerk where, as the art
historian Sabine Plakolm-Forsthuber aptly summarizes, “stylistic freedom of contradiction was the
maxim.” Ibid.
85 Josef August Lux, “Kunstschau Wien 1908,” Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration 23 (Oct. 1908): 53.
86 A.F. Seligmann, “Kunstschau 1908,” 14.
87 Karl Kuzmany, “Kunstschau Wien 1908,” 530.
88 Lux, “Kunstschau Wien 1908,” 53.
89 Ibid.
91 Lux regarded art as a form of play for children and assumed that the ultimate function of
“working amateurs” like those graduates of the Böhm School was to create objects to beautify the
home.
92 Laven, “‘First Class,’” 79.
93 Women artists in Vienna around 1900 organized a separatist professional network—e.g., the
Viennese Women’s Academy (1897) and the Association of Austrian Women Artists (1910) plus
its radical offshoot, the Wiener Frauenkunst (1926)—that demanded access to male artistic and
educational institutions. After a long and bitter struggle, women were admitted to the Austrian
Academy of Fine Arts in 1919–20; women were not admitted as regular members of Vienna’s “Big
Three” exhibition houses (Künstlerhaus, Hagenbund, and Secession) until after World War II. On
the politics of single-gender institutions and women’s admission to the Academy of Fine Arts, see my
forthcoming article: Megan Brandow-Faller, “Tenuous Mitschwestern: Mobilizing Vienna’s Women
Artists, 1914–1920,” Austrian Studies 21 (Fall 2013), in a special issue titled “Cultures at War, 1914–18.”
94 The work of Pavel Jirásek and Traude Hansen on Secessionist toys is less concerned with issues
of gender than design; notions of the entwined critical fortunes of women and children receive no
special emphasis.
95 Lux, “Kunstschau Wien 1908,” 56.
96 Karl Gröber, Kinderspielzeug aus aller Zeit, 1.

195.43.22.136 on Mon, 28 Jun 2021 17:31:38 UTC

This Content Downloaded From 195.43.22.136 On Mon, 28 Jun 2021 17:31:38 UTC

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

This Content Downloaded From 195.43.22.136 On Mon, 28 Jun 2021 17:31:38 UTC

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

“An Artist in Every Child—A Child in Every Artist”: Artistic Toys and Art for the Child

at the Kunstschau 1908

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

196 West 86th V 20 N 2

This content downloaded from

Primitivism, Folk Art, and Artistic Toys in

Progressive pedagogical reforms spearheaded by the Vienna Secessionists

“An Artist in Every Child—A Child in Every Artist” 197

This content downloaded from

198 West 86th V 20 N 2

This content downloaded from

Hevesi’s sentiments on children’s drawings aptly summarize the primitive quali-

“An Artist in Every Child—A Child in Every Artist” 199

This content downloaded from

200 West 86th V 20 N 2

This content downloaded from

Secessionists praised the simplicity and childlike innocence of locally made

“An Artist in Every Child—A Child in Every Artist” 201

This content downloaded from

202 West 86th V 20 N 2

This content downloaded from

Drawing on the language of traditional peasant toys, innovative designers

In this interdisciplinary workshop atmosphere, Secessionist professors like

Harlfinger’s toys, which tended toward formal reduction, were constructed of

“An Artist in Every Child—A Child in Every Artist” 203

This content downloaded from

Such stylization can best be observed in photographs of toys, now in a pri-

204 West 86th V 20 N 2

This content downloaded from

“An Artist in Every Child—A Child in Every Artist” 205

This content downloaded from

An emphasis on inventive originality and humor marked the work of Harlfin-

206 West 86th V 20 N 2

This content downloaded from

We must be wary against nothing greater than the affected imitation of

“An Artist in Every Child—A Child in Every Artist” 207

This content downloaded from

Fig. 10–11 (bottom)

208 West 86th V 20 N 2

This content downloaded from

Prominently positioned were the displays of children’s art—art made both

“An Artist in Every Child—A Child in Every Artist” 209

This content downloaded from

210 West 86th V 20 N 2

This content downloaded from

“An Artist in Every Child—A Child in Every Artist” 211

This content downloaded from

212 West 86th V 20 N 2

This content downloaded from

“An Artist in Every Child—A Child in Every Artist” 213

This content downloaded from

214 West 86th V 20 N 2

This content downloaded from

“An Artist in Every Child—A Child in Every Artist” 215

This content downloaded from

216 West 86th V 20 N 2

This content downloaded from

“An Artist in Every Child—A Child in Every Artist” 217

This content downloaded from

218 West 86th V 20 N 2

This content downloaded from

Assessed in terms of objects conceived with the eyes of a child, avant-garde