Margarete von Brauchitsch a Modernist Designer

Illustration: Margarete von Brauchitsch. Embroidery design work in a contemporary interior setting, c1905.

Margarete von Brauchitsch is perhaps not the best known of early twentieth century artists and designers, although throughout her career she was both popularly admired and held as an example of one of the leading pioneers to be found in contemporary decoration and design. She was particularly favoured in both German design magazines such as Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration and Dekorative Kunst, as well as the English Studio magazine.

Von Brauchitsch produced work in a number of disciplines including textiles, wallpaper, ceramics, stained glass and clothing. Although trained as a fine art painter, she studied under Max Klinger in Leipzig; it was in the world of decoration and design where perhaps she really made her mark. Although producing work in a range of disciplines as just stated, embroidery was a particularly rich vein and one in which she was to push the traditions of that discipline in to the new twentieth century, a century that offered a seemingly endless supply of new innovations and ideas.

Her work seemed to start conventionally enough with her embroidery work following closely the ideas of floral interpretation and inspiration as dictated by the Art Nouveau movement. However, by 1905 her work was being featured much more publicly and the design work itself had been shorn of much of its floral decorative format. Brauchitsch started to produce simple but effective geometric borders, as well as pattern work that often followed simple lines across fabrics, in many respects following the line of the original warp and weft pattern produced by the initial weaving of the background fabric. 

Illustration: Margarete von Brauchitsch. Embroidery design work in a contemporary interior setting, c1905.

Her new reliance on the bold and the simple was remarked upon in a number of leading articles concerning her work. The Studio magazine for example when reviewing an exhibition of contemporary needlework at the Konigliches Kunstgewerbemuseum in Berlin in 1908 said of Brauchitsch that she:

'...cultivates a geometrical style of design. She chooses strong and simple colours, violet and green, black and green, brown and white for her linen ground. She can be graceful or strong, rich and sparing, but she appears always reliable and uniform.'

Interestingly, at the 1908 exhibition she was considered to be on an equal measure with one of the leading contemporary designers of the period Henry van de Velde. In fact, The Studio magazine considered both Brauchitsch and van de Velde to be part of what they termed 'the cooler sphere of logic.' This then placed Brauchitsch within the leading contemporary movement in Germany and as one of the innovators of the modern movement which was rapidly replacing the older ideals of the Jugendstil in Central Europe. 

The modern movement in design and decoration was one that saw itself as an integral part of modernist architecture, believing itself to be a reflection of the paired down and minimally inspired architectural work that was beginning to make its effect in Germany in particular. Modernist exteriors needed modernist interiors and in this way designers such as Brauchitsch produced work that intimately followed the strict vertical and horizontal lines being produced within the new architecture. It was a form whereby all aspects of the new contemporary building needed to be harmonised with common themes being reproduced across all disciplines that made up exterior and interior settings.

The three photographs that illustrate this article are from around 1905 and clearly show the embroidery work of Brauchitsch in an interior setting. These photographs are invaluable as they show the new twentieth century interior, one with no decorative or ornamental elements within the room itself and furniture and accessories being strictly shorn of all or most ornamental affectations. The room is clearly very different from the exuberance to be found in interiors that reflected the passing of the Art Nouveau style and was probably purposely so. The decoration that has been included within the room is textile based. Therefore the carpet and embroidery work are the only visible decorative detailing and these follow the general theme of the geometrical strictness of the room by being paired down and minimalized.

 Illustration: Margarete von Brauchitsch. Embroidery design work in a contemporary interior setting, c1905.

Although the interior shown and the integral embroidery work of Brauchitsch was clearly seen by many as being nothing more than an interesting contemporary conceptual interior with no real practical application, many others saw it as a real movement towards the rationalisation of a whole range of disciplines from the actual architectural framing to the decorative embroidered accessorising. This was meant to signify the coming century and a belief in the contraction of decoration and ornament into a much more manageable state, countering the excesses of the nineteenth century which had seemingly had its final flourish as Art Nouveau.

Although this rationalisation and simplification of a decorative interior did have some way to go before becoming both popularised and standardised as a European and then World norm, it is interesting to see some of the early experiments in decorative formats being tested and tried in various Central European exhibitions and leading publications. That a woman also became such an integral part of this experimentation in architecture and design should be applauded. Margarete von Brauchitsch was a member of the Deutsche Werkbund and pushed tirelessly for the equal recognition of women as fellow artists and designers, seeing no real difference with men in goals and achievements within the disciplines they worked in. That she was one of only a few women in the midst of a majority of men perhaps showed how far women still had to go not just to be counted as physically of equal measure, but also creatively. That von Brauchitsch did so shows a strength of personal character, but also an individual who was willing to push the boundaries of herself and her gender, as well as that of the world of design and decoration into the largely unknown contemporary world of the twentieth century.

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Modernist Textile Pattern Work by Emil Pirchan

Illustration: Emil Pirchan. Woven textile design, c1909.

Emil Pirchan is perhaps better known for his work in the German theatre, particularly in set design, much of which was produced during the early part of the twentieth century. However, as with many artists and designers of his period, Pirchan was also involved as an educationist and as a designer in a number of disciplines, including textiles.

The illustrations produced in this article show a variety of both printed and woven textiles produced by Pirchan in about 1909. They are an interesting example of some of the results that he achieved in direct geometrical pattern work, similar to the results of many of his contemporaries who were producing sometimes quite radical textile design work across Central Europe, and particularly in Germany, during the first decade and a half of the twentieth century, before the start of the First World War.

Illustration: Emil Pirchan. Woven textile design, c1909.

Although Pirchan was born in what is now Brno in the modern Czech Republic, he spent much of his career first in Vienna and then in Munich and although he was involved primarily within the theatre, his work in textile design is a good example of some of the leading developments in contemporary textile design and pattern work during the early twentieth century. Pirchan's examples, although by no means singular, do show the capacity of the creative designer to embrace the aspirations and ideals of the new century while also reflecting the real and tangible results of the contemporary as seen in mass production methods, modular architecture and fine art abstract development.

The particular interest that Germany seemed to have in the acknowledgement of the contemporary within the decorative arts can be seen in some of the work produced by Pirchan during this period. There was a an interest, even fascination, with the ideal of the machine and its capacity for the unswerving and unchanging reproduction through the industrial process. Rather than taking the stand, as many in England did, of seeing the idea of mass production as the enemy of creativity, many German designers tried to understand and acknowledge the place that the industrial process held in a contemporary society. By recognising, even conceding, that the machine could not be removed or discarded as regards the production of contemporary textiles for example, this then allowed the designer to embrace the practical and technical aspects of production. In turn this then helped to fuel a different kind of design and pattern that would both compliment the process of mass production, while also allowing contemporary innovation to be seen in the end product.

 Illustration: Emil Pirchan. Printed textile designs, c1909.

By embracing the practical technology of mass production, textile design work in Germany during the early years of the twentieth century was often, although not always, aligned with the strictness of the geometric. Woven fabrics were particularly sensitive to geometry as they were largely constructed from fibres arranged on the horizontal and vertical. This allowed the woven fabric to naturally follow a simple geometrical pattern of right-angles as can be seen in some of the examples produced by Pirchan. That these were also then taken across to printed textiles which did not have the same technical constraints as the woven process, shows perhaps the expansion of interest in both the structure of the highly limited but often hypnotically captivating appearance of the seemingly unlimited repetitive quality of the pattern work, along with the imposed geometrical and its increasing alliance with the idea and ideal of the contemporary as seen by those living in the first couple of decades of the twentieth century. This was a century after all, that was seen by many within the design field as one with a huge potential for fundamental change in all avenues and not just that along the lines of a redefinition of pattern and decoration.

 Illustration: Emil Pirchan. Printed textile designs, c1909.

That there were sometimes obvious compromises made within this highly structured geometric format perhaps goes without saying. Although some pattern work during this period closely followed the remit of a simple and sometimes brutal appearing repetition, other designers took elements of both, the implication of mass production as well as that of artistic individualism, mixing the two sometimes effectively, sometimes not. However, the often uncompromising look of geometrically inspired pattern work was a stand taken by the contemporary world, often against quite substantial opposition from critics and designers, many of whom had spent much of their careers in the previous nineteenth century. Although it is too simplistic to paint a them and us scenario between the older and younger generations of designers, this form of near abstract pattern work formed an interesting and quite important development within the history of the role of pattern in European textile design that was to have an effect on the future of the direction that the decorative arts were to take, at least in Central Europe.

Illustration: Emil Pirchan. Woven textile design, c1909.

Many of the features that were to eventually become recognisable as the Bauhaus style, particularly amongst their textile production, can be seen in Germany within these early years and in some respects the textile design work produced by such individuals as Pirchan could be seen as a form of pre-Bauhaus because of their close alliance, at least in appearance, but also in their sympathy with the contemporary world and its reliance on the available technology along with its production methods, which was to an extent, to guide mass production textile pattern work for some time to come.

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