Josef Hoffmann at Fischer Fine Art

Richard Calvocoressi

The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 120, No. 898. (Jan., 1978), pp. 45+48+51.

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 C U R RE N T A N D F O R T H C O M I N G
seems to double as elbow for the right arm,
partially seen alongside the mirror, her
right hand gently lifting her skirt. From
what we can tell of the angle and position
of her head in relation to the mirror, it is
not at all clear that we should see the
model's face reflected so that she can both
peep at herself from within the mirror and,
a t the same time, look beyond the 'trans-
parent window' of the actual painted can-
vas to the viewer looking in. Offering a
dialectic between illusion and reality, car-
ried forth with high wit and skill, La Psyche'
is a painting that reveals Stevens's intelli-
gent preoccupation with the nature of his
art.
Another picture in the exhibition takes
on particular interest in relation to one of
the most famous mirror images of the
nineteenth century, that in Manet's Bar at
the Folies-Bergdre, I 88 I , also in the Court-
auld. I n view of their close relationship, it
would not be surprising for Manet to have
known Stevens's Un chant passionnd (Fig.50)
of c.1875 (Muste de Compikgne; bought
by the French government and placed in
the Luxembourg, it may have been avail-
able to Manet right along). The two paint-
ings share a number of elements : a woman
centred before a mirror that is placed
parallel to the picture plane, her reflection
seen in lost profile, body leaning towards
the right. The possibility that Manet may
have had Stevens's painting in mind is
suggested particularly by the last detail,
but whereas the active lost profile makes
perfect sense in Stevens's picture, it does
not in the Manet. The angle and place-
ment of the various mirrored elements in
Un chant parsionne' are properly established,
however, only in relation to a specific
viewing position, near the right edge of
the painting, just opposite the singer's
reflection. I n that position the viewer also
receives, in effect, the attention bestowed
by the singer as she rotates toward her left.
Stevens pinpoints a spot at which, ideally,
we should stand; both the turn of the
singer's body and her reflection fix that
location. Manet's barmaid, by contrast, is
dissociated from her reflection, as may be
ascertained by specifying the vantage
point(s) that Manet implies for the viewer.
His frontal barmaid roots us to the spot,
centred before her and the painting. Her
mirrored image to the right asks that we
step to the right to properly receive the
angle of reflection (the angle of her body
in lost profile, however, could not be liter-
ally connected to the frontally fixated bar-
maid; that is Manet's invention, one that
may have its derivation from Stevens's
painting). Manet divides the world before
the mirror from the image within it by
specifying two viewing positions and thus
designating a mobile observer. Stevens
cunningly establishes a single vantage;
Manet, possibly building from his example,
posits the kind of multiple viewing that
was being explored, a t the same time, by
Degas in his pictures of women at their
toilet (e.g., The Tub, 1886, Louvre),
Ctzanne in his still lifes, and Renoir in
48
E X H I B I T I O N S
such composite compositions as Gondola in
Venice, I 88 I .
I t would seem to be precisely Stevens's
pictorial adventurousness and acuity of
vision that endeared him to the Impres-
sionists; it was his refusal or inability to go
one step further than he did that provides
much of the reason why his reputation has
languished and why it has taken so long
for an exhibition of this size to reach
American shores. The result is often fas-
cinating, the paintings illuminated both
by the light that Stevens so carefully
obse~vesand renders and by the unfailing
intelligence that he brought to his task.
JOEL ISAACSON
Josef Hoffmann at Fischer Fine Art
Although Josef Hoffmann ( I 870-1956)
has featured in exhibitions in London
before now - at the Royal Academy's
'Vienna Secession' in 1971 and at a small
but interesting mixed exhibition, 'Vienna
I 900-1 93 I,, held at the Piccadilly Gallery
in 1973 - he has never been given a one-
man show. The recent exhibition at
Fischer Fine Art (November and
December I 977) was therefore something
of an occasion, and with a reasonable
number of objects from Hoffmann's most
innovatory period ( 1900-o8), it got off to
a good start. There was a fine modern-
looking chair of 1903 in oak, crisp and
cuboid (Fig.53) ; another in white painted
wood, originally in the bar of the Kabarett
Fledermaus, a nightclub for artists and
intellectuals whose design and furnishing
were carried out by the Wiener Werkstatte
in 1907; and there were several of those
elegant baskets (see Fig.54), boxes and
ashtrays in precious and semi-precious
materials for which Hoffmann and the
Werkstatte were famous. Most of the
baskets are made of metal and painted
white; their slender, rectangular handles
resemble tiny climbing frames, a hallmark
of Hoffmann's style.
Hoffmann's clean straight lines and
fastidious attention to detail are best seen
in such things. This was, after all, the
period of his two most important archi-
tectural commissions : the Sanatorium
Purkersdorf and the Palais Stoclet, the latter
a remarkable collaborative effort in total
design, as luxurious as the Sanatorium is
sachlich. The exhibition contained nothing
relating to these projects and the cata-
logue illustrates only the exterior of both
buildings. The rest of the exhibition con-
sisted almost entirely of designs on paper,
undated, but by the look of them, from the
1920s, SO that the overall picture of Hoff-
mann was sadly incomplete. The single
exception was a small section devoted 'to
Hoffmann's work on a private house for
the Bernatzik family in 1912; one room
of this was redesigned in 1932 while the
whole house was restored under Hoff-
mann's supervision after the Second War.
There were plans and some furniture
designs but attempts to recreatethe interior
of the house through small photographs
did not really come off.
Another photograph, this time blown
up too large, showed the drawing room
in the Palais Wittgenstein, commissioned
from Hoffmann in 1905 by Karl Wittgen-
stein, millionaire industrialist and patron
of the arts, who also commissioned Klimt
to paint a portrait of his daughter Her-
mione the same year. I t was Hermione
who, twenty-one years later, persuaded
her brother Ludwig Wittgenstein to de-
sign a whole house for her in another part
of Vienna. That house, the work of
Ludwig and Paul Engelmann, a pupil of
Adolf Loos, is informed with the same
spirit of total design which characterises
Hoffmann's work: Ludwig spent as much
time and thought on doorhandles and
radiators as he did on ground plan and
elevations. There can be no doubt that
Hoffmann's sharp geometry and classical
proportions rubbed off on Ludwig, al-
though it was Loos who persuaded him
that decorative detail and expensive
materials were unjustifiable luxuries in the
modern age - a belief Hoffmann did not
share. I n 1914 Ludwig inherited his
father's house and fortune but renounced
both. Hoffmann's drawing room is now
apparently up for sale.
Some of Hoffmann's designs for glass,
tableware and chairs executed in the
1920's betray, somewhat ironically, the
influence of the Bauhaus and other
modernist designers. There was, for
example, a neat little drawing in the
Fischer exhibition of a tubular steel
chair; another of a Thonet bentwood of
the type popularised by Le Corbusier
(here, as in so many other instances, fol-
lowing Loos). But there can be no ques-
tion that Hoffmann's example meant a
great deal to modern architects. Letters
of admiration were on show in the exhibi-
tion to prove it: from Aalto; from Le
Corbusier, who had met Hoffmann on
his Grand Tour in 1907; from Neutra,
heaping praise on the Palais Stoclet, which
he had visited with Le Corbusier in 1929;
and finally from Gropius, on Bauhaus
writing-paper dated September 1924,
urgently appealing to Hoffmann to join a
'Friends of the Bauhaus', which he was in
the process of founding in a n attempt to
persuade the local council a t Weimar not
to close down the place. A pencilled note
in Hoffmann's hand tells of his accept-
ance, three days later, by telegram.
What is needed in Britain (the new
Hunterian Art Gallery a t Glasgow Uni-
versity would seem a n obvious place for
this) is a n exhibition not only of Hoff-
mann's design work but of the products of
the Wiener Werkstatte. I t is astonishing
to think that there were sufficient wealthy
clients wanting one-off, high quality
objects to keep the Werkstatte going for
nearly fifteen years after the collapse of
Austria-Hungary; it closed only one year
before the Bauhaus, in 1932. I n the
1g20's much of the simple elegance of its
early style was replaced by decorative
 C U R R E N T AND F O R T H C O M I N G E X H I BITIONS
mannerisms, some of which verge on the
kitsch. It also started to design women's
clothes, a departure heavily criticised
by Loos. But there were talented
artist-designers among the team - Kolo
Moser (co-founder, with Hoffmann),
Eduard Wimmer, Carl Otto Czeschka
and, in ceramics, Berthold Loffler and
Michael Powolny - whose work deserves
to be better known over here.
RICHARD CALVOCORESSI
La Quadreria di Don Lorenzo de
Medici - Florence, Villa Medicea di
Poggio a Caiano
Considering the comparative newness
of Florentine seventeenth-century studies
and the present preponderance of largely
stylistic attributions, Dr Evelina Borea's
idea of mounting an exhibition with such
a strong core of documentation was par-
titularly welcome. This is the first exhibi-
tion in the field to take as its premise a
didactic rather than an aesthetic ap-
proach: the consequent dangers in con-
nection with a provincial school where for
every masterpiece there are fifty mediocre
works must have been apparent to any
visitor to the exhibition. Nevertheless,
within its undeniable - but self-appointed
- limitations, this was an important
exhibition which will hopefully point the
way to others exploring specific aspects of
the period in Tuscany.
Don Lorenzo de' Medici (1599-1648)
was the youngest son of the Grand Duke
Ferdinando I, brother of Cosimo I1 and
uncle of Cardinal Leopoldo de' Medici.
Inheriting the villa della Petraia in 1609
(where ideally this exhibition should have
been held to facilitate the comparison of
the large group of Volterrano drawings
shown with the frescoes for which they are
preparatory), it is almost certain that
Lorenzo had already formed his collection
in part by the early 1630's. By that time the
first generation of Florentine 'Baroque'
artists was already old (Biliverti, Jacopo
da Empoli, Coccapani, Curradi, Rosselli
and Ottavio Vannini), and the second
generation was reaching artistic maturity
(Cesare Dandini, Orazio Fidani, Mar-
tinelli, Ficherelli, Lorenzo Lippi and,
precociously, Dolci). Considering this
variety of available talent, Lorenzo ap-
pears to have remained remarkably con-
servative, not to say limited in his taste,
although to judge him on the contents of
the Petraia quadreria alone is to do him an
injustice since a number of his more
important paintings such as Furini's
Birth of Rachel (Schleissheim), Lot and his
daughters (Prado) and Giovanni da San
Giovanni's celebrated Prima notte di notze
(Pitti) appear never to have been at
Petraia. The basis of the exhibition was
the inventory of the villa's contents made
in the year following Lorenzo's death and
which is reproduced in its entirety in the
catalogue. A reconstruction of the quadreria
does not take account of any objects
which might have been removed by other
members of the Medici family before the
inventory could be made, and the fact
that of the seventy-four more or less
securely attributed paintings among ap-
proximately 200 listed only two (a Rubens
and a Tintoretto, neither so far identified)
are by what might be termed major
painters seems to confirm this.
Forty-six pictures which figure in the
inventory were on show together with a
section of portraits of don Lorenzo, a
group of prints dedicated by Callot and
Della Bella to the Prince, thirty-eight
Volterrano drawings for the cortile frescoes
at Petraia, a pietre dure table top and a
Susini bronze. In qualitative terms, the
collection varied between the outstanding
(Vannini's Chastity of Joseph, Giovanni da
San Giovanni's Mystic Marriage of St
Catherine, Cesare Dandini's Portrait of La
Bettona (Fig.55), Dolci's Stefano Della
Bella (Fig.56) and the less than mediocre
- Empoli's dull Creation of Adam, some of
the Dandini, Leonardo Ferroni's copy of
Furini's Rachel made when Lorenzo gave
the original to the Marchese Ferdinando
Ridolfi, and almost all of the genre
and still-life. The two large Vincenzo
Dandini (see Fig.57) provide the key to
a current in Florentine painting pre-
viously categorised by Giuseppe Cantelli
as 'I Furiniani'. This blanket term, useful
mainly in connection with Furini's most
direct followers such as Pignoni, has led
to the attribution of one of the period's
greatest pictures, the Schleissheim Arte-
mesia to Onorio Marinari (G. Cantelli,
Antichitd Viva, No.4, 1971). Dr Borea
interestingly reattributes this to Vincenzo
Dandini, correctly pointing out that
Dandini's sources lie largely outside
Florence in the Roman classicist works of
Camassei and Romanelli. It is tempting
to add to this group the Wallace Collec-
tion and Salzburg variants of St Catherine
reading, formerly given to Dolci, which
bears a close resemblance to both the
Schleissheim picture and don Lorenzo's
Venus, Mercury and Cupid. Another per-
sonality partially reconstructed by this
exhibition was that of Vincenzo Mannozzi
(died 1657) whose oval Hylas, at first
glance very close to Volterrano, permits a
comparison to be made between the two
painters' styles. I n the same series as
Volterrano's zephyr and other ovals by
Cesare Dandini and Sustermans, Man-
nozzi's handling appears less bold than
Volterrano's, his psychological charac-
terization more subtle, while in the two
other pictures by him from the quadreria
a certain eclecticism is evident in borrow-
ings from Della Bella's paintings on
pietra di paragone, Lorenzo Lippi and
Volterrano.
Many points arise from an exploratory
exhibition of this type which will no doubt
be taken up in future research. The
restoration and late arrival at the exhibi-
tion of Michele Desubleo's huge Tancred
and Erminia (Fig.58), long known through
Lastri's Etruria Pittrice plate and painted
in Bologna for Lorenzo in 1641 seems
particularly interesting in view of the
latter's similarity to certain features of
both versions of the theme by Poussin
(Hermitage and Birmingham, Barber
Institute). That Vincenzo Giustiniani was
one of Desubleo's admirers as early as the
mid-1630's may be significant in this
context. Dr Borea's identification of the
Dolci portrait previously called A Youth
of the Casa Bardi (Pitti) as Stefano Della
Bella (Fig.56) seems acceptable on the
strength of the inventory description of the
painting and given that Della Bella would
have been 21 when Dolci was 15 (when
the portrait was painted) - coincidentally
with Lorenzo's most generous patronage
of the engraver.
CHARLES MCCORQUODALE
(The Age of Tiepolo' at Stuttgart
I t is always a joy to visit a museum run
by a director who is also a distinguished
art historian with both knowledge and
taste (he must have both), and Stuttgart is
one of them (not to be visited by Luft-
hansa). Gerhard Ewald is well known as
an authority on the Florentine Seicento,
and his studies of Cecco Bravo, Volterrano
and so forth are familiar to readers of this
Journal. He has been buying for his
museum works of this school but of course
has not restricted himself to a single field;
since the early 1970's he has acquired on
the international market a group of
Italian Settecento pictures of truly National
Gallery standard. I cite a selection: one of
the best Felice Boselli genre pieces, of a
Dovecot, from which I have extracted
(Fig.64) a detail of the lower half showing
a boy raising a hatch and making the sign
of silence; a Circumcision by an artist I am
ashamed to admit was unknown to me,
Jacopo Cestaro (detail, Fig.61), a follower
of Solimena and De Mura, a study for an
unidentified or destroyed altar-piece; the
great late Crespi Jupiter among the Corybantes
published by Miss Merriman in our July
1976 issue; three fine Giaquintos; a large
Giordano Visitation on copper; a Claudian
Van Lint landscape with figures by
Batoni; two Magnasco genre scenes of the
highest quality; a De Mura S. Gennaro,
like the Crespi from Colnaghi's; two
Pittoni mythologies and a Ricci-like
Pellegrini Bacchanal; a sweet Rotari study
of a girl done in Russia (from Agnew's) ;
and as a complete contrast a powerful
Death of Messalina (Fig.65) showing
Solimena at his best. With the emphasis
on the Roman and Neapolitan late
Baroque, Ewald has proved himself a
member of the post-Anthony Clark clan
which believes that Venice was not the
only city in Italy boasting of great schools
of painting in the eighteenth century. In
fact there are only two Venetian-born
artists in this list.
Ewald had the idea of organising at the
Staatsgalerie an exhibition of his Set-
tecento purchases, along with the Italian
5'
53. Chair, by Josef Hoffmann. 1903. Oak; height, 79 cm. (Exh. 54. Basket wilh Blue Glass, b y Josef Hoffmann. White painted
Fischer Fine Art Ltd., London). metal with glass; height, 18 cm. (Exh. Fischer Fine Art
Ltd., London).

55. La Bettona, by Cesarr Dandini. Canvas; 57.5 by 45 ~111. (Florentine

Galleries). ~ i l a t i n a Florence).
,