Description
Book SynopsisExamines the work of artists trained at the Viennese Women’s Academy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Explores generational struggles and diverging artistic philosophies on art, craft, and design.
Trade Review“Following the book’s aim of ‘bring[ing] a lost female heritage in handcraft and decorative art into focus,’ the book’s greatest strength lies in is its scope and interdisciplinary appeal, which allows scholars from a variety of disciplines to integrate the decorative and its proponents, the forgotten women of the female Secession, into their research and syllabi.”
—Franziska Schweiger Journal of Design History
“Brandow-Faller breaks new ground in the history of the decorative arts.”
—Niccola Shearman Art History
“Throughout this beautifully illustrated and thoroughly researched work, Brandow-Faller succeeds admirably in resurrecting an important aspect of the Viennese Secession and the influential role of women’s academies and their graduates.”
—Christa Spreizer Studies in Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century Literature
“Impeccably researched, The Female Secession is an invaluable contribution to scholarship on early twentieth-century Austrian art and to feminist art history. Brandow-Faller persuasively argues that the self-consciously feminine art produced by Women’s Academy artists should be understood as part of a feminist lineage that leads through the artwork of 1970s feminist artists such as Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro and on to that of craftivists of the twenty-first century.”
—Bibiana Obler,author of Intimate Collaborations: Kandinsky and Münter, Arp and Taeuber
“This beautifully illustrated study brings new attention to the overlooked achievements of women artists in Vienna in the early twentieth century. It is a much-needed contribution to design history that illuminates the role of gender in Central European art education and professional practice.”
—Rebecca Houze,author of Textiles, Fashion, and Design Reform in Austria-Hungary Before the First World War: Principles of Dress
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: A Female Secession
Part I Women’s Art Education
1. The Art of Unlearning at the Viennese Women’s Academy, 1897–1908
2. Surface Decoration and the Female Handcrafts in the B.hm School
3. Separate but Equal? Academic Accreditation and the Question of a Female Aesthetic at the Viennese Women’s Academy, 1908–28
Part II The Female Secession
4. Kinderkunst and Frauenkunst at the 1908 Kunstschau
5. The Birth of Expressionist Ceramics: “Crafty Women” and the Interwar Feminization of the Applied Arts
6. Decorative Trouble: Collectivity, Craft, and the Decorative Women of the Wiener Frauenkunst
Conclusion: The Collapse of the Female Secession, 1928–38
Notes
Bibliography
Index
