MAK: A Shot of Rhythm and Color
About two months ago a new exhibition was launched at the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna dedicated to English textile design at the turn of the 19th century.
The Collection of Textiles and Carpets at the MAK is home to an unusually large group of around 900 English textile and wallpaper samples from the period before and around 1900. The exhibition focuses on these textiles while also providing a look at contemporaneous arts and crafts output in other materials.
The increasing industrialization of 19th-century England saw commensurate growth of the middle class. This market was served via the mass production of affordable textiles, the stylistic sophistication of which increased considerably during the century’s second half.
The Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, founded in 1887, mounted presentations of modern arts and crafts that saw the participation of artists such as William Morris, Walter Crane and Charles f. A. Voysey, whose works are also shown in this exhibition. The style that was then subsumed under the term “Arts and Crafts” embodied a reaction to the aesthetic and economic development of midcentury English output.
The MAK acquired contemporary textiles from England in the late 19th century and presented numerous panels in an exhibition together with contemporary examples from Belgium, France, and Italy as early as 1899. Viennese artists and tradespeople, as is shown prominently in the new Vienna 1900 exhibit of the MAK Permanent Collection, were thus given the opportunity to get acquainted with and take inspiration from innovative, English designed products even prior to 1900.
Interested in finding out more about English textile design and the collection? Visit the museum's website or download the exhibition folder!
