The Art of Advent: Day Twenty One
By Nicole Entin
It is the winter solstice today, and with only four sleeps until Christmas, it is also that time in the holiday season when you are finishing writing your greeting cards for your friends and family. So with this theme in mind, the 21st day of HASTA’s Art of Advent series is taking you to one of the Christmas capitals of the world – Vienna – to find some inspiration for your own holiday cards in the work of the Wiener Werkstätte. Founded by Koloman Moser and Josef Hoffmann, the Wiener Werkstätte was a collective of artists and designers who revived artisanal craft techniques and holistic methods of production in the early twentieth century, uniting fine and decorative arts in the creation of products including metalwork, ceramics, fashion and jewellery design.
In 1907, the Wiener Werkstätte would begin to create a numbered series of nearly a thousand postcards, a project that made the works of artists including Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele accessible to the public at affordable prices. While the postcards have an incredible thematic range, we will be looking in particular at the series of Christmas and New Year postcards created by the Wiener Werkstätte, with their wonderful wintry landscapes, whimsical colours, and even occasionally frightening imagery.
(Left) Carl Krenek, Christmas Card, 1912, colour lithograph, 13.9 x 9 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
(Middle) Anton Velim, Glückliches Neujahr! , colour lithograph, Neue Galerie New York, New York.
(Right) Mela Koehler, Advent Card, c. 1910, colour lithograph.
The leftmost snowy scene is by the painter and artist Carl Krenek, and depicts an old man carrying a bundle over his shoulder as he trudges through the snow banks to the gate of a magnificent house framed by tall pines. Trained originally as a textile maker, Krenek was one of the most prolific postcard-makers in the Wiener Werkstätte, and specialised in countryside or even fairytale scenes in his designs. In the centre, we have a greeting card for the New Year by Anton Velim, a member of both the Vienna Secession and the Wiener Werkstätte. In this sweet scene that looks as if it came straight from a beloved picture book, a little boy and girl dressed in matching white outfits pet a fawn in a snowy forest, evoking imagery of new life and the coming spring – perhaps a nod to the Ver Sacrum, the sacred spring, that was the calling card for the Secession. The final picture on the right, by the artist and fashion illustrator Mela Koehler, presents the imagery of Advent in a rather different perspective. Koehler draws on the folklore of Central and Eastern Europe to depict the figures of Saint Nicholas and Krampus, who would either reward or punish children for their behaviour in the past year. The depiction of children in Koehler’s image could not be further from Velim’s New Year’s card. With a benevolent St Nicholas dressed in gold with a traditional mitre and crosier watching over the scene, the demonic goat-horned Krampus chases after two frightened children with his birch rod.
So, whether you want to give a greeting card to your best friends or to your annoying younger siblings or cousins, hopefully these Wiener Werkstätte postcards have given you a few last-minute ideas.