At the 1908 Kunstschau exhibition in Vienna, designer Carl Otto Czeschka displayed alongside other objects of applied art an exquisite vitrine in silver and glass, decorated with costly inlays of ivory, lapis lazuli and semi-precious stones. It was immediately purchased by the steel magnate Karl Wittgenstein, a prominent patron and supporter of the Vienna Secession. The vitrine remained in the Wittgenstein family until 1949, when it passed into private hands before reappearing at auction in New York in 2013, when it was acquired by the Dallas Museum of Art. This slim, beautifully produced volume celebrates that important acquisition.
This concise study focuses on a single work of outstanding quality rather than attempts to retell the larger story of what the English periodical The Studio identified as the “Austrian art revival”. It contains two substantial essays: one setting the vitrine within the context of Czeschka’s work of that period by Kevin Tucker, who is the senior curator of decorative arts and design at the Dallas Museum of Art, and the other by the conservator Fran Baas, which analyses the piece’s material components and the processes involved in its manufacture and restoration. But the principal delight is a magnificent clutch of colour photographs, among them pin-sharp close-ups of many of the vitrine’s finer details. Curiously, an illustration of artist Berthold Löffler’s placard advertising the pageant that marked the 60th anniversary of Emperor Franz Josef’s accession to the throne is wrongly identified here as a poster for the 1908 Kunstschau.
Peter Vergo is an emeritus professor of art history and theory at the University of Essex, and has published widely on 20th-century German and Austrian art
The Wittgenstein Vitrine: Modern Opulence in Vienna
Kevin W. Tucker
Yale University Press in association with the Dallas Museum of Art, 88pp, $30, £20 (hb)
