Textile Transfers

The exhibition is closed on the 1st of May (public holiday).

The careers of Rosalia Rothansl (1870–1945) and Mileva Stoisavljevic-Roller (1886–1949) are examples of both the professionalization of women artists in the context of the admission of women to what was then called the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts, as well as of the modernist orientation of its artistic pedagogy in the early 20th century.

As one of the first women in Central Europe ever to receive a professorship, Rothansl taught artists such as Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, Elisabeth Karlinsky, Vally Wieselthier, and Emmy Zweybrück in the field of textile techniques. Stoisavljevic trained as a graphic designer and enamel artist at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts and was active early on in the Secession milieu, contributing to the journals Die Fläche (The Surface) and Ver Sacrum.
The exhibition contextualizes the work of these two protagonists for the first time on the basis of their textile collections, which have been preserved at the Collection and Archive of the University of Applied Arts Vienna in the form of two omnibus volumes. These feature multicolored, hand-crafted pieces of woven, knit, embroidered, and lace clothing and fragments in regionally specific patterns, originating from anonymous creators in the rural regions of Bohemia, Moravia, Dalmatia, Galicia, Lodomeria, and Bukovina, but also South and East Asia.

The exhibition investigates the two volumes as reflections of an interest in what became known as Volkskunst” (folk art), which gained strength in the second half of the 19th century and was palpable in the newly established humanities disciplines as well as in the applied arts and contemporary museum practice. This interest connects the collections of the two artists with figures such as the haute couturière Emilie Flöge, the ethnologist Michael Haberlandt, and the art historian Alois Riegl.

Textile Transfers approaches Rothansl’s and Stoisavljevic-Roller’s multifaceted use of textiles as artistic models and artifacts. On the one hand, the exhibition highlights Rothansl’s teaching and the relevance of her curatorial practice at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts for the work of her students, with reference to individual careers. On the other hand, it tracks the photographic staging of clothing compiled by Stoisavljevic as examples of reform dress, placing it in the context of the artist’s connection with the Klimt group. Furthermore, the exhibition traces the roles the items in the collection played in the construction of national identity and the transformation of gender relations in the context of the reform of arts and crafts around 1900. The eclectic composition of the textile collections raises questions as to the existence of a primitivism peculiar to Viennese Modernism, in light of its appropriation of artistic knowledge practices from regions that appear to belong to the “peripheries” of Austro-Hungary or the “Orient.”

With the kind support from ERSTE Foundation