Large Original Jugendstil Brochure from Vienna Erwin Puchinger Graphic Design

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Large Original Jugendstil Brochure from Vienna Erwin Puchinger Graphic Design:
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ERWIN PUCHINGER
(1876-1944)Artist - Designer - Illustrator - ProfessorWir haben mehrere dieser Zeichnungen - überprüfen Sie bitte unsere anderen Angebote!Wir kombinieren Verschiffen und sind einfach, mit zu arbeiten!Graphic MasterpiecePrinter\'s Proof /Graphic Design Brochure
Unsigned, Erwin Puchinger\"K.K. Photo Chemigra\"Brochure DesignCirca 1900
Large Size on Thick StockVery Good Condition Face and Back - Hand Printed15 1/4\" x 11 1/4\"
CONDITION: EXCELLENTSTORED OUT OF LIGHT
ERWIN PUCHINGERBIOGRAPHY

Erwin Puchinger (1876-1944) was a talented Viennese painter;illustrator and graphic designer. An influential figure in the incredibly richartistic and cultural milieu of turn-of-the-century Vienna, he had a genius fordesign and was one of the leaders of the Austrian Jugendstil and Gesamtkunstwer(total art) movements, which sought to erase the boundaries between fine artand applied art. Puchinger worked in London and Paris as well as the Austriancapital and collaborated with other major figures in Viennese art and design.For many years he also served as a highly respected art professor who taughtgenerations of Austrian students.

Student Days in Fin-de-Monde Vienna

Erwin Puchinger was born in Vienna, the capital of theAustro-Hungarian Empire, on July 7, 1875. He came from a prominent andinfluential family, which encouraged his artistic talents and made sure that hereceived professional training from an early age. In 1891 and 1892, Puchingerattended evening drawing classes at the newly opened (1888) Graphic Arts andResearch Institute, the school (der Graphischen Lehr und Versuchsanstelt) wherehe would eventually teach. This was an experimental institute that aimed tocreate a synthesized approach to training professionals in the emerging fieldof the graphic arts by combining a photography school, a photographic researchinstitute and an art school all at a single location in Vienna.

The School of Arts and Crafts was where many of the greatturn-of-the-century Viennese designers matriculated and he and his classmateslike Kolomon Moser (1868-1918) were ambitious young men with an interest inmastering virtually every discipline that a designer would be likely toencounter. The course of instruction that they followed gave them not onlytheoretical instruction, with hands-on experience in graphic design and theproduction of magazines and books, but also industrial design and the crafts ofenameling, ceramic manufacture, metalwork and working with fabrics. This gavethem the ability to speak the same language as the craftsmen who would becharged with translating their designs into objects that could be manufacturedand sold.

Drawing and painting were still at the core of thecurriculum, and by the time Puchinger and Moser attended it the art departmentof the Kunstgewerbeschule rivaled that of the old academy in prestige.Puchinger is first listed as studying with the figurative painter LudwigMinnigerode (1847-1930). Both Moser and Puchinger also studied with the popularart professor Franz von Matsch (1861-1942). With the talented brothers Gustav(1862-1918) and Ernst Klimt (1864-1892), Matsch had had a decorating companythat did elaborate murals for wealthy clients. The firm closed because of ErnstKlimt’s untimely death and disagreements between the remaining partners.Puchinger’s proximity to Klimt clearly influenced the later direction of hisart. Even a cursory glance at Puchinger’s early student works of 1893 and 1894reveal his talent as a draftsman. His landscape and architectural drawings of1892 and 1893 were already of a professional quality, drawn with a confidenthand and an artistic flair, but in these early works, there was not yet a hintof the direction his work would take in the final years of the 19th century.

From the beginning of his career, Erwin Puchinger was firstand foremost a draftsman, an artist who could draw with dexterity andprecision. In his era, drawing was still properly seen as the foundation onwhich an artistic career was constructed. However, in fin-de-siècle Vienna,drawing was much more than a medium used for preliminary works or a disciplinethat artists had to master through on their way to becoming painters. It wasnot, in other words, subservient to painting, but rather its own discipline. In1891, when Puchinger was just beginning his studies in the art of drawing, theGerman Symbolist sculptor and draftsman Max Klinger (1857-1920) came out with apopular and influential essay (“Painting and Drawing” or Malerei und Zeichnungin German) in which he advocated drawing as a separate and distinct form ofexpression. He felt painting should be used for the portrayal of reality whiledrawing and graphic media were an ideal way to depict fantastic ideas, dreams,and fantasies. Even the finest of the Viennese painters, like the PrometheanGustav Klimt, were first and foremost draftsmen, although many of Klimt’s earlydrawings emphasized tonality over linearity. In Vienna, graphic media of alltypes – graphite, charcoal, pen & ink and printmaking – were valued as anend in themselves, and during his student career Puchinger became skilled invirtually all of them.

1890s Vienna was an exciting place, a center for artisticand intellectual development that rivaled Paris and London. It was home to thecomposers Richard Strauss (1864-1949) and Gustav Mahler (1860-1911), SigmundFreud (1856-1939) and the architects Otto Wagner (1841-1918), Joseph MariaOlbrich (1867-1908) and Josef Hoffman (1870-1956). The old town walls had beentorn down and the famous loop of the Ringstrasse has been born. While thefamous “Dual Monarchy” of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was old decrepit andwould soon fall, its instability seemed to add to Vienna’s intellectual,political, cultural and artistic ferment. In every European capital, societywas being re-shuffled. For the first time, people who came from marginalizedgroups were beginning to contribute, not only to commercial enterprises, butalso to the intellectual and cultural development of their nations. Thanks tothe process of industrialization, a person with a good idea and the capital toback it could succeed beyond his wildest dreams, even if by rising to the tophe risked causing resentment and upsetting the old order of things.

In Vienna, new thinkers in every realm of society werechallenging ideas that had been fixed, concepts that had been part of thecommon currency of their culture. It seemed like everything – politics,religion, sexuality, art, culture – was up for discussion in the hothouseEnvironment of the famous Viennese coffeehouse. The era of one Strauss and hisdas Bleu Danube was over and the era of another Strauss and his Also sprachZarathustra was just beginning, and soon the rebellious rabble would bewaltzing on the graves of their monarchs. After the crackdowns that followedthe revolts of 1848, a growing middle class had risen up and demanded limits tothe power of the Monarchy and, in the second half of the 19th century, a seriesof reforms led to a more liberal and tolerant social order. However, thistemporary liberalism papered over the ugly truth of a vicious factionalism thatremained just beneath the surface of society, a factionalism that wouldeventually pit the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s Germanic peoples against the Slavsand the other ethnic and religious minorities that made up a large part of theempire’s population.

Atop the tottering “Dual Monarchy” of Austria and Hungarysat the aged Franz Josef (1830-1916), heir to the Hapsburg dynasty, who hadascended to the throne in the wake of the upheavals of ‘48. His life had beenfull of tragedy. In 1853, he barely survived an assassination attempt at thehands of a Hungarian nationalist in. In 1889, his son and only male heir, CrownPrince Rudolph (1858-1889), committed suicide at the Mayerling Hunting Lodgewith his illicit lover. Franz’s wife and empress, Elisabeth of Bavaria(1837-1898), was assassinated eleven years after the death of their son. Inspite of all this, Franz-Josef remained on the throne and by the 1890s, graphicartists like Puchinger were kept busy creating art that celebrated his varioussilver jubilees and rendering the double eagles that were symbolic of theempire he ruled. It is probably the fact that we know what loomed ahead, thefate that awaited Austria, that gives fin-de-monde Vienna, the Vienna of theartists, architects and designers, its own unique romantic aura, for there is awhiff of doom in everything we view and read.

When Puchinger was in the midst of his artistic studies, agroup of young architects and artists began to challenge the old order. Seekingto create a cultural world that reflected its time, their motto encapsulatedtheir belief that “To the Age, Its Art.\". The young architects, Wagner,Hoffman and Olbrich, rejected the opulent and decadent style of the day, thehodge-podge of architectural styles of the Ringstrasse. Influenced by classicalGreece and Rome and with a new spirit, they created new buildings that wereclean and modern, yet still retained a striking decorative element.

In the Viennese art world, Gustav Klimt, who had been theprotégé of Hans Makaert (1840-1884), the great master of the Viennese academy,became an artistic rebel who rejected the conformity of the academy and what hesaw as a stifling creative atmosphere. Klimt was a born draftsman, skilled witheither tone or line. For years he had been a successful decorative painter inthe service of the Viennese elite and while he had a thorough academicgrounding, his eclectic tastes gradually overcame his training and a myriad ofinfluences changed his work dramatically. There was a strong naturalisticelement to his output, but there were also echoes of ancient Egypt, theclassical world and even Florentine decorative painting of the Renaissance.Klimt absorbed contemporary influences as well - everything from the work ofthe emerging German and Belgian Symbolists to the art of the more interestingpainters of the French and English schools. Everything he saw and felt wassynthesized and came pouring out in his work. He created easel paintings andmurals that were startling, powerful and uniquely decorative, an art that trulyreflected Vienna as it was at the end of end of the glittering, gilded anddecadent 19th century and the beginning of a 20th century of clashingideologies.

In 1897, a group of the most dynamic Viennese artists andarchitects broke away from the old academy, the Association of Austrian Artiststhat had held its exhibitions in the old Kunstlerhaus, to create a new unionknown as the Union of Austrian Artists (Vereinigung Bildender Künstler Österreichs)that will forever be known as the Vienna Secession (das Wien Sezission). Theoriginal members of the new union of forty painters, artisans and architectsincluded the artists Gustav Klimt, Kolomon Moser and Max Kurtzweil (1867-1916)as well as the architects Joseph Maria Olbrich and Josef Hoffman. Klimt waselected President of the new organization. Although Otto Wagner, who designedthe Sezession Haus, became one of the group’s iconic members, he was not one ofits initial founders. While most rebellious artistic groups have a manifesto orat the very least a number of common stylistic similarities, this wasn’t thecase with the Viennese Secession. They were a group of artists who were unitedby what they were against – the notion of artistic conformity – rather thanwhat they were for. This lack of common goals and interests eventually led todivisions between the Secessionists and collaborations between members whoshared the same ideals.

Every young art student in Vienna paid rapt attention to thesaga of the Secession and the controversies between Klimt and von Matsch andtheir ill-fated commission to paint decorations for the Great Hall of theUniversity of Vienna. Most of them wanted their work to be fresh and new, toreflect their times. At the Kunstgewerbeschule, Puchinger was friends with“Kolo” Moser, a graphic artist and designer who seemed to effortlessly throwoff designs for everything from books to furniture to household objects tocomplete interiors. Even a cursory comparison reveals many commonalitiesbetween their graphic art and design work, but whether they exerted aninfluence on one another in their student years or were simply drinking fromthe same well of creativity and influences has not yet been established.

The Viennese students passed around copies of the Munichpublisher George Hirth’s (1841-1916) influential little art weekly Jugend(Youth). Jugend, which was founded in 1896, grew out of the international Artsand Crafts movement; Its thin issues were filled with the latest in graphic artby the finest young painters from Germany and abroad. Jugend was so influentialthat it gave its name to the German Art Nouveau movement, which became known asJugendstil, or “Youth-style,” after the magazine. Puchinger and the other artstudents of the day absorbed the heady mix of mythology, symbolism anderoticism that was found in Jugend and a similar publication, titled Pan. Thehand-lettered typefaces that were found in its pages also had an effect on theyoung artist who would soon be producing lettering for the emerging VienneseJugendstil publications. While we can see the influence of the harder-edgedGermanic style of Art Nouveau on Puchinger’s emerging turn-of-the-century work,he also came under the spell of the work of French and Belgian Art Nouveaudesigners and their more organic style that relied on natural forms forinspiration.

In January of 1898, the members of the Viennese Secessionreleased the first issue of their own art publication, Ver Sacrum (latin for“Sacred Spring”). Their goal for the publication was to produce an artisticjournal with a uniquely unified design. The designers sought to unifytypography, ornamentation and images into pages where none of the componentswere subordinate to the other, where each would be part of a seamless whole.Members of the Secession even designed the advertisements. From the beginning,the short-lived (1898-1903) and incredibly time-consuming publication was aquixotic endeavor. In addition to exceptional Viennese artists like KolomonMoser and its first editor Alfred Roller (1864-1935), its contributors includedthe Moravian architect Alfred Loos (1870-1933) and the Bohemian poet RainerMaria Rilke (1875-1926). Each issue was given over to a theme, such as theinfluence of Japanese Art. The beautiful periodical introduced foreign artistslike the Parisian-based Czech Alphonse Mucha (1840-1939) and the BelgianSymbolist Ferdinand Khnopff (1858-1921) to its German-language audience.

In the last decade of the 19th century, Viennese art anddesign was heading towards a new notion, the concept of a synthesis of thearts, of an idealized work of art or a total art, which became known in Germanas Gesamtkunstwerk. Although the actual term had been coined back in 1827 by alittle known German writer and then popularized by the composer Richard Wagner(1813-1883) for his new concept of opera, it had a different meaning whenapplied to the world of art and design. To a number of the VienneseSecessionists, Gesamtkunstwerk meant two things – first, eliminating what theysaw as artificial barriers between fine and applied arts; and second, creatingliving Environments where everything was part of a unified concept. Now, theidea of unified design had first re-emerged during the Arts & Crafts movementwith creative designers like William Morris (1834-1896). When Art Nouveau wasborn, the emphasis on hand-made and well-designed objects took on a new lookand young artists decided they wanted to design practical as well as decorativeobjects. When the Viennese designers – and their counterparts like Henry van deVelde (1863-1957) in Brussels or Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928) inGlasgow – looked back at a Renaissance genius like Michelangelo, they realizedthat the creative spirit should see no barriers, no division of labor betweenthe tasks of designing and engineering a building, furnishing it and thencreating sculpture or paintings to enhance it. When one of the emergingViennese architects designed a building, he wanted to design and supervise theentire process – the landscaping, design and construction of the building, theinterior design, the furniture and even the housewares. To them, it was alldesign, total design. So artists and architects of a like mind began tocollaborate on ambitious projects, for commercial or institutional use or forresidences.

For a talented young man like Erwin Puchinger, the conceptof Gesamtkunstwerk was appealing, for he had not only the ambition, but alsothe talent, drive and a decade’s worth of workshop training that would allowhim to blur what used to be firm boundaries between fine art and applied art.Puchinger could design decorative wallpaper, wall hangings, ceramics, furnitureand household objects crafted in metal. His graphic design work (known as Flächenkunstin German for flat or graphic art) had developed in the emerging Jugendstilstyle where illustrations and text were all part of a grand design. Puchinger’spen & ink drawings reproduced beautifully on the printed page and by thedawn of the new century, he would take his place in the pantheon offin-de-monde Viennese artists and designers and would see his work exhibited toacclaim throughout Europe.

Paris 1900

1900 was the pivotal year in Erwin Puchinger’s early career.After nine long years at the Institute, he finally completed his course ofstudy. He had made sketching trips to Capri and Rome, where he drew from theantique and absorbed the classical influences that were popular sources ofinspiration for Viennese designers and architects. Growing out of the moreaustere Arts-and-Crafts movement and influenced by Japanese art, Art Nouveauwas a truly international style and different offshoots of this dynamicmovement were found in Paris, London, Chicago, New York, Prague, Brussels andMoscow as well as Vienna. At the international exhibitions and through thepages of magazines like International Studio, the artists and designersinfluenced each other and Art Nouveau was to reach its high water mark at thefamous Exposition Universelle, the 1900 Paris World\'s Fair, on the cusp of anew century.

At the Fin-de-Siecle fair, Art Nouveau was all the rage andthe huge Austrian pavilion featured the finest in Viennese Jugendstil design.It was decorated with paintings and applied art that reflected the excitingdevelopments that had occurred in Vienna in the 1890s, and the young artistsand artisans of the Kunstgewerbeschule had an elaborate exhibit. This exhibitwas a personal triumph for Erwin Puchinger, for his major decorative paintingwas the centerpiece of the exhibit. This work still resides permanently on thewalls of Austrian Musuem of Applied Art, (The famous “MAK,” or OsterreichischesMuseum fur angewandte Kunst Gegebwartskunst). Puchinger collaborated with GeorgKlimt (1867-1931), another talented younger brother of Gustav Klimt, on itsunique metal repoussé frame in the curvilinear Art Nouveau style. The exhibitthat Puchinger was such a vital part of featured an elaborate Jugenstilinterior with sweeping decorative designs on the walls, completed withspecially designed furniture. In the French catalog, the exhibit was listed asa “Panneau pour a salon du musique. Cadre de E. Puchinger, scuplte de G. Kilmtet F. Siegel.” (Panel for a music salon by the Puchinger group, sculpture by G.Klimt and F. Siegel) The interior was an idealized space, an example of theprinciple of Gasamtkunstwerk, of integrated design where everything in theinterior was part of a unified whole.

1900 was also the year that Puchinger chose which of theViennese artistic factions he would join. Instead of joining the artisticprogressives of the Secession Haus or the conservatives of the Kunstlerhaus, hewas one of the artists that formed a third group that seemed to split thedifference between the two opposing camps. Resigning from the traditionalacademic group, the Kunstlerhaus, they formed the Hagenbund, named for thepatron of the café they met in. The artists who ate and drank at the Zum BlauenFreihaus included Puchinger, Oskar Laske (1874-1951), Michael Powolny (1874-1954),Josef Urban (1872-1933) and Heinrich Lefler (1863-1919). Most of the artists ofthe Hagenbund group focused on the landscape and the group remained activeuntil 1938, when it was dissolved following the Anchluss.

1900, the last year of the old century, was also thebeginning of Puchinger’s professional career and he received a great boost whenhis Paris Exposition work was reproduced in the first issue of the legendaryapplied art periodical Das Interieur (The Interior). He also received an offerto begin teaching drawing at the Graphic Arts Research Institute (derGraphischen Lehr-und Versuchsanstelt), where he had began his studies in 1891.With the development of photo-offset lithography and other new methods of reproduction,there was a great demand for designers and artisans who were qualified throughprofessional training.