EXHIBITION REVIEW: VIENNESE STYLE

The story behind the exhibition now on at the Panasonic  Shiodome Museum of Art is a strong one, but you may need to sharpen a few historical reference points to get the most out of it.

Let’s start with Mozart, whom, everyone “knows,” was buried in a pauper’s grave. Except that he wasn’t. When the composer died in 1791, he was actually buried according to the new rational “enlightened” style, introduced by the modernising Emperor Joseph II (the "too many notes" guy in the movie Amadeus).

This new method of burial, which was aimed at reducing disease, involved—temporarily—large, shared pits outside the city walls and the reusable “Josephinian” coffin that deposited its occupants into the pit with a drop bottom. It is easy to see how this might later come to be regarded as a "pauper burial," but at the time it was the cutting edge and the latest thing.

The key point this anecdote makes is that Vienna, despite its air of feudal tradition and imperial pomposity, has always had something radical and forward-looking in its cultural DNA, and this is exactly what the exhibition Viennese Style: Biedermeier through Fin-de-Siècle explores in the design of furniture, daily artifacts, and graphic arts of the great city over a period of more than a hundred years.

Curated by Professor Ryu Niimi of Musashino Art University with input from Dr Sachiko Kubo-Kunesch, Dr. Paul Asembaum, and Dr Ernst Ploil, the exhibition starts not with Mozart’s untimely death but with examples of Biedermeier furniture, like the elegant, fan-backed mahogany chair from around 1820 and a number of beautiful silverware items from the early 19th century. These all have the imprint of Neoclassicism.

Chair, c.1820, Solid mahogany, mahogany veneer, ebony inlays, textile, Asembaum Collection, © Asembaum Photo Collection/ Casserole, 1804, Ignatz Joseph Würtz, silver, Asembaum Collection, © Asembaum Photo Collection

Like a lot of terms in art, “Biedermeier” was originally meant as an insult. It was coined as a nickname, derived from a fictional character “Gottlieb Biedermeier” (literally “Plain Mr. Biedermeier”), featured in satirical poems at the time, mocking the less ornate tastes of the bourgeoisie.

Now, however, the term has the resonance of stylish, practical home-ware items ahead of their time, which is probably why a museum representing Panasonic has such an affinity with it.

Portrait of the fictitious character Gottlieb Biedermeier from the Munich Fliegende Blatter

Picking up momentum in the years after the Napoleonic years, the Biedermeier style influenced everything from interior design and furniture to fashion, visual arts, literature, and even music. However, it quickly went out of fashion round about 1850.

It seems odd that such a forward-looking style, so well suited to modern mass production with its clean lines and smooth surfaces, should have disappeared when it did, but no doubt part of the story was the 1848 Revolution, when the bourgeois masses—presumably led by figures just like the fictional Gottlieb Biedermeier—almost brought down the great monarchies of Central Europe.

In the aftermath of this event, there was a something of a swing away from anything that seemed radical and modern, and a renewed preference for the clunky and cluttered, the overly decorative styles that we now mentally associate with late Victoriana.

But Biedermeier style did not go away, it merely lay dormant for a few decades until its undeniable resonance with nascent modernity made it an obvious touchstone and inspiration for a new generation of architects and designers, like Josef Hoffman, Kolomon Moser, Otto Wagner, and Dagobert Peche, who were all tied together by the Wiener Werkstätte (literally “Vienna Workshops”)

This was a cooperative of artists, architects, designers, and craftsmen founded in 1903 that was dedicated to “total design”—gaining confidence from the Arts and Crafts movement sweeping Britain, but going for the more sinuous and flowing lines of the French Art Nouveau. The key point, however, was a stylistic rejection of the imperial grandeur and pomposity that in the modern day we now strangely see taking over Trump’s redesign of the White House.

The exhibition drives home the strong “underground” affinity of this style with the Biedermeier by setting items side-by-side that, although a hundred years, seem made by the same hands or at least have much in common.

Teapot, 1802, Jakob Krautauer, silver, fruitwood, Asembaum Collection, © Asembaum Photo Collection/ Koloman Moser, armchair, c. 1903, Prag-Rudniker, beech, cane, Toyota Municipal Museum of Art

This is a rich anAd rewarding exhibition that covers several different media and even bracnches off to look at the British-based Jewish potter of Lucy Rie (1902-1995), who fled to England in 1938, whose work often seems like a bridge between Austrian design and Japanese aesthetics.

Lucie Rie, bowl with pink inlaid design, late 1970s, porcelain, private collection, estate of the artist

It is often said that the devil is in the detail. This exhibition shows that it is sometimes in the lack of detail also, something that allows the inherent beauty of well-designed objects to speak to us more directly. 


Panasonic Museum of Art, Now ~ 17th December

Adults: ¥1,500

Visitors aged 65 or over with valid documentation: ¥1,400

Students (high school and college): ¥1,000

Admission is free for children in middle school or younger.  Admission is free for disability passbook holders and up to one accompanying adult.  

More info