VIENNA.- This year’s annual exhibition Josef Hoffmann—Koloman Moser (through 28 October 2018) in Josef Hoffmann Museum in Brtnice, a joint branch of the Moravian Gallery in Brno and MAK Vienna, is dedicated to relations between two artist friends and preeminent designers of Viennese Modernism. The works of Koloman Moser (1868–1918) are considered the artistic antithesis of Josef Hoffmann’s (1870–1956) when it comes to the architecture of their designs: while Hoffmann remained a tectonically austere creator, Koloman Moser always incorporated a decorative, painterly element. Designs and objects from the areas of graphics, glass, and ceramics are displayed in the exhibition so as to place these exceptional artists’ works in dialogue with one another and render their individual characteristics visible.

The careers and works of both creators are closely linked. Both were founding members of the Vienna Secession and, from 1899 onwards, both taught at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts (today’s University for Applied Arts Vienna). Together with the industrialist Fritz Waerndorfer, they founded the Wiener Werkstätte in 1903, thus having a crucial influence on the applied arts in Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century. Their Viennese style became a synonym for clarity of design, geometry, and stylized decoration.

Moser did not only partake in Vienna’s artistic emergence around 1900 but helped shape the process from the beginning. This is reflected in a speech entitled “My Work” that Hoffmann delivered in 1911, where he already praised Moser’s talent as an organizer, a talent from which the Secession, the School of Arts and Crafts and the Wiener Werkstätte all benefitted. According to Hoffmann, it was the “painter Moser who, thanks to his illustrative works, knew more about the outside world and henceforth exercised the greatest influence over us. It seemed to us that he had a fabulous talent for handling surfaces and inventing all manner of things in the applied arts. He considered it his duty to provide support and stimulation at every opportunity.”

Koloman Moser studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts. He specialized in decorative painting, which initially led to him working as a graphic designer for the mouthpiece of the Secessionists, the magazine Ver Sacrum founded in 1898. He then went on to work closely with Joseph Maria Olbrich on the design of the Secession (1898): the Eulenfries [Owl Frieze], the frieze of the Tänzerinnen [Female Dancers] and the round glass window above the doorway are all by Moser. His graphics were widely disseminated in the form of patterns for interior decoration in portfolio works such as Die Fläche [The Surface] (1902).

Prior to 1905, when he exhibited together with the Klimt Group, Moser was responsible for 23 Secession exhibitions—whether as sole designer or working together with Hoffmann— and involved in two further exhibitions. The characteristics that distinguish the works of Moser from those of Hoffmann are particularly pronounced in the furniture that Moser designed for the groundbreaking 8th Secession Exhibition (1900), where the use of basic stereometric forms contrasts with rich surface decoration. With the design of the Beethoven Exhibition (1902), the 14th Secession exhibition for which Gustav Klimt created the famous Beethovenfries [Beethoven Frieze], Moser—“inventor of the chessboard pattern”—defined his “reductive style.”

For his villa on the Hohe Warte—conceptualized by Hoffmann, once a student of Otto Wagner—Moser designed the interior (1901) himself. Up until leaving the Wiener Werkstätte in 1907, Moser, a designer with a decorative approach, provided an important counterpart to Hoffmann’s linear austerity. Together, they developed a style of interior design founded upon basic geometric forms, as seen in their interiors at the Wiener Werkstätte in Neustiftgasse (1903) as well as the fashion house of the Flöge sisters (1904).

In contrast to Hoffmann, color and surface remained important elements of the creative process for Moser, who principally focused on painting after 1907. Particularly famous among the works that they created together are the furnishings for the Westend sanatorium in Purkersdorf (1904/05), where Moser’s white concave furniture and the touch of color in the textiles contrast with Hoffmann’s strict style in blue and white.

The exhibition Josef Hoffmann—Koloman Moser overlaps spatially and thematically with the permanent exhibition Josef Hoffmann: Inspirations, which traces Hoffmann’s sources of artistic inspiration in his place of birth Brtnice.