Illustration: Joseph Maria Olbrich. Rug design, c1900.
Rug design in the early twentieth century, despite the perceived domination of Art Nouveau styling, came in many different formats; some were obviously more personal based than others, while others veered more towards a regional or historical perspective.
The Austrian architect and designer Joseph Maria Olbrich could be said, to a certain extent at least, to have followed a path that led to a relatively high and unique level of creativity. So much so that his textile work, although showing in parts the penchant in Europe for Art Nouveau, was much more linked to his own ideas and unique parameters concerning decoration and pattern work.
Olbrich produced work in a number of textile disciplines including embroidery and rug design. The two rug designs illustrating this article were produced in about 1900 and clearly show the nature of some of Olbrich's personal work during this period. He had a confident and free hand and was unencumbered with affectation or some of the more complex and invasive stylisations of Art Nouveau, whether German and Austrian or indeed French and Belgian led. However, despite the pattern work in these two examples seeming to be led by Olbrich's own personality, both are still very much inspired by nature and the larger natural world than they are by any man made ideals.
Although by no means necessarily universal in scope, the human preponderance for the natural world as both inspiration and guide has dominated many aspects of the human development of decoration and pattern. It would seem inconceivable not to have nature in all its aspects, at the heart of our decorative tendencies, so much so that it seems of little value to mention it in the first place. However, to recognise the debt humans owe to the natural world that always surrounds us, and then to see it channelled through the abstract and semi-abstract pattern work of designers across the generations, can still hold a fascination despite the intervening millennia.
Illustration: Joseph Maria Olbrich. Rug design, c1900.
Olbrich has used nature to his own effect and instils a wonder in the shape and tone of his work that appears effortless, but rarely ever is. His rug designs appear to be art works in their own right and unlike a number of carpet and rug designs of the later nineteenth century; these pieces seem rarely to have been intended as subservient accessories to an overall scheme. While it would have been good to have seen these pieces in their original colour schemes in order to understand how Olbrich used colour and tonal variation in the finished pieces, they are still interesting in their monochromatic format as the pattern outlines can be appreciated in their own right, rather than playing a subservient and sometimes confusing role to that of colour.
The two rug designs are excellent examples of Austrian decorative work from the end and very beginning of the twentieth century. They give at least some indication of the genuinely unique cultural achievement that was Vienna during this period. While many parts of Europe were producing standard Art Nouveau formats, Viennese designers were beginning to stretch the boundaries of the European decorative arts to both see what was achievable, but also perhaps more importantly, in order to find a new format for a new century. That Austrian decorative work during this period used the unique format of the artist and designer, along with their own creative insight into the natural world, pattern work and their sense of historical perspective as regards the cultural attachment of the artist to their own and shared past, set up a distinct and special interlude in European decorative history, one that was to have a far reaching effect on the future role of Modernism and twentieth century decoration in general.
That Olbrich played a partial but central role in this re-designing of a format cannot be denied. He was one of a group of German and Austrian architects, designers and artists that through their separate but shared creative uniqueness, have given us a wealth of work as well as a fascinating but still relevant vocabulary of decoration and pattern that still holds our fascination to this day.
Further reading links:
Joseph Maria Olbrich
Joseph Maria Olbrich Architecture
JOSEPH MARIA OLBRICH: ART TO
Olbrich: Ideas
JOSEPH MARIA OLBRICH: Architecture---Complete Reprint of the Original Plates 1901-1914
Art Nouveau (Midsize)
Vienna 1900
Klimt, Schiele, Moser, Kokoschka: Vienna 1900
Birth of the Modern: Style and Identity in Vienna 1900
Vienna 1900: Art, Life & Culture
Fin-De-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture
Wittgenstein's Vienna
Freud, Dora, and Vienna 1900
Vienna 1900 (Memoires)
Vienna 1900: The Architecture of Otto Wagner
Good Living Street: Portrait of a Patron Family, Vienna 1900
Vienna 1900: Art, Architecture & Design
Art in Vienna
Rethinking Vienna 1900 (Austrian History, Culture and Society, 3)
Sacred Spring: God and the Birth of Modernism in Fin De Siecle Vienna
Egon Schiele and His Contemporaries: Austrian Painting and Drawing from 1900 to 1930 from the Leopold Collection, Vienna
Vienna 1850-1930: Architecture
Vienna's Golden Years of Music, 1850-1900 (Essay index reprint series)
