Illustration: Josef Zotti. Hand printed linen textile design, c1913.
Josef Zotti was born and raised in South Tyrol, which is now known as Trentino and is an autonomous province of Italy, but until the end of the First World War was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In this respect, although Zotti was of Italian extraction, he spent most of his working career in Vienna, even after his homeland became part of Italy.
Zotti, although largely forgotten today was a relatively wide-scaling and prodigious designer who worked in a number of fields including interior, furniture, metal and textile design. He was closely associated with Josef Hoffmann and was indeed a student of his. His work is said to reflect the influence of Hoffmann and through that the Wiener Werkstatte, which was to colour the interpretation of Austrian design in the early years of the twentieth century. However, although his styling does follow Hoffmann it is also distinct enough to be seen as a separate entity from his former teacher.
Although much of Zotti's surviving output seems to specialise on furniture design in particular, his textile design work is worth mentioning as it is an integral part of the wider Viennese design style of the early twentieth century. The two textile designs illustrating this particular article were produced by Zotti in about 1913. They are both hand printed linens and were produced for and by S. E. Steiner & Co. Both are unmistakeably Austrian in style using the tell-tale simplicity of motif in order to produce a vibrant all-over pattern. It is unknown what colour combination was used on these two designs which is unfortunate, as part of the appeal of Zotti as a person and creative individual was his lengthy exploration of colour as a theoretical subject. Throughout his career, the designer lectured and published articles devoted to the importance of colour and its function, particularly within the framework of surface pattern. In this respect his textile output is an important element of early twentieth century Viennese styling which inevitably leads on to both modernism and the more commercial decorative style of the twentieth century such as Art Deco. However, although the colour combinations are missing, it does allow for the examination of the pattern itself which can sometimes clouded by the forceful and forthright nature of colour.
Illustration: Josef Zotti. Hand printed linen textile design, c1913.
Both patterns are simple, even naive examples of all-over pattern work using the natural world as at least an originating point of reference. In some respects, the work is similar to Josef Hoffmann especially when considering the use of regularised motifs repeated across the fabric. However, Hoffmann's work very often tended towards the structured, giving a grid-like format to textile design. Zotti's approach seemed somewhat freer and much more fluid and had perhaps a closer association with the likes of Emanuel Josef Margold, Erich Kleinhempel, Herta Koch and even Lotte Frommel-Fochler than it did Hoffmann, despite the fact that Zotti is often closely associated with Hoffmann. It is the wider Central European decorative style of Germany and Austria in which Zotti's work fits comfortably, rather than the narrower confines of Hoffmann himself who produced a style that was fitting to his own creative allegiance, not Zotti's.
Zotti's work in some ways at least, reflects the European-wide trend towards the loosening of the ties between formalised surface pattern and a much more relaxed and painterly approach. This was to prove to be an extremely rich and wide-scaling approach that was to see a surge of individually inspired decorative work that placed the emphasis on the ability of the creative individual rather than the accomplished but tightly bound and relatively narrow parameters of the traditional realm of the decorative artist. The early Art Deco era in France of the 1920s and the post-war period of the 1950s in Britain were particularly good examples of the individuality of the artistically motivated designer outweighing the needs of formalised decoration. In some respects, Zotti and his fellow Austrian designers of the early twentieth century could be said to have helped add the dimension of the creative into the mix of the European decorative arts, which had for centuries run on very narrow definitions of creativity and artistic license. It is, for example, the disbanding of formalised and symmetrical Art Nouveau renderings of surface pattern that gives much of the European decorative work of the 1920s such a charming appeal, particularly creatively. Although Zotti and his contemporaries cannot be held directly responsible for this development, they certainly set out a lot of the groundwork and it is not a huge jump creatively between Zotti's work of 1913 and the work being produced in the decorative arts world of 1923.
Further reading links:
Josef Zotti, 1882-1953: Architetto e designer = Architekt und Designer (Italian Edition)
Wiener Werkstatte: 1903-1932 (Special Edition)
Wiener Werkstatte: Design in Vienna 1903-1932
Textiles of the Wiener Werkstatte: 1910-1932
Viennese Design and the Wiener Werkstatte
Josef Hoffmann: Autobiography
Josef Hoffmann Designs: Mak-Austrian Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna
Josef Hoffmann: The Architectural Work
Josef Hoffmann, 1870-1956: In the Realm of Beauty (Taschen Basic Architecture Series)
Klimt, Schiele, Moser, Kokoschka: Vienna 1900
Freud, Dora, and Vienna 1900
Rethinking Vienna 1900 (Austrian History, Culture and Society, 3)
Birth of the Modern: Style and Identity in Vienna 1900
Vienna 1900: Art, Life & Culture
Vienna 1900
Vienna 1900 (Memoires)
Vienna 1900 from Altenberg to Wittgenstein (Austrian Studies, 1)
Vienna 1900: Art, Architecture & Design
