Night and day at the Villa Henneberg

 

Yet again I have been put onto something intriguing by the vigilant Jim Barnes in Scotland. This time it is an unexpected connection between the Scottish art nouveau designer, Margaret MacDonald, and a man who has had considerable coverage over the years on Modern Printmakers. I mean Hugo Henneberg. To be honest, I was unaware of the extent of Henneberg's collecting, but in the photograph (above) from the Austrian magazine Ver Sacrum you can see a smoker's cabinet he bought from MacDonald and her husband, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, after it was exhibited at the 8th Vienna Secession exhibition in 1900.

The two silver-plated panels representing night and day were made for the cabinet by MacDonald in 1899 and were considered lost until they turned up for sale at Dorotheum where they sold for 94,000 euros. That was in December, 2019. As you see, they combine classic elongated art nouveau forms with the eliptical shapes characteristic of the Celtic style which played such a part in the national revival in Scotland and Ireland. The ancient Celtic-speaking people of the maritime coast of Europe were famed for their craftsmanship, particularly in bronze, copper, gold, silver and enamel and, as Simon Esmond Cleary once said, objects like the British torc (below) from 1st Century BC remain the finest things ever made on these islands of ours.

 

But it was all rather odd the way MacDonald went about it. She wore her own hair the same was as the figure in the panel and the whole approach had a sense of theatricality and dressing up which now appears to be at odds with the stringency of what became modern design. Nevertheless, Scotland made a unique contribution and the purchase of MacDonald and Mackintosh's work by such an innovatory artist was typical of the eclecticism of so much modern art (though eclectic may not be the word art historians would make use of).

Henneberg may already have been thinking about a setting for his new piece of furniture because soon afterwards he asked Josef Hoffman to design a house as part of a group of four artist's residences on the Hohe Warte in the hills above Vienna. The semi-detached houses occupied by the artist, Carl Moll, and designer Koloman Moser were covered some years ago in a post called ' Carl Moll: secessio plebis in montem sacrum'. It was a title I could not resist. Nor could another well-known blogger resist the idea I had had because it was immediately plagiarised much to everyone's disbelief.

The Villa Henneberg in particular gave expression to the idea that fine art, design, architecture, gardening and music all belonged together in the same domestic setting, even if it was nit a very comfortable one. Dress reform also played its part as you can see from the photograph of MacDonald. Gustave Klimt was famous for wandering about in long loose gown and Henneberg went to him for a portrait of his wife, Marie, to hang above the over-scale fireplace in the large hall, which you can see in the immaculate maquette above. It was made deliberately hard to say whether you were inside or out. The trellis pattern was borrowed from garden design and it naturally played a part outside.

The house was completed in 1902 in a style which I can feel no great enthusiasm for and which I suspect would generally be regarded to day as laboured if not heavy-going. What it gained in originality, it lost in charm. I used to think that was the way it was with the secession but it was much the same with other artist's houses. About 1906, Pierre-Auguste Renoir had a house built in a gnarled old olive grove above Cagnes sur Mer near Nice. Supposedly based on a local style of farmhouse, the exterior is striking for its overall lack of appeal, but is full of exquisite detail and such a a refined sense of colour, it makes the National Trust look like beginners.

See also 'Hugo Henneberg and the history of linocut' and 'Hugo Henneberg, the first linocut virtuoso'.

Carl Moll : secessio plebis in montem sacrum

In 1900 Carl Moll (1861 - 1945) asked the architect and designer Josef Hoffman to build him a house on the Hohe Warte in Vienna. In fact, it was called a doppelhaus, not exactly what the British describe as semi-detached, but there was an adjoining house for the designer Koloman Moser (1868 - 1918). Moll was approaching forty, a successful painter, who had helped lead many talented artists out of the Kunstlerhaus, which was more or less the only place artists could exhibit, to form the Vienna Secession in 1897. It was curious name, radical and yet conservative. It had been adopted by the first secession at Munich in 1893 and based on the Latin tag secessio plebis in montem sacrum, recalling the way the common people had left the city of Rome to build their own homes away from the dominance of the patricians. You can see some leading members of the Secession in the well-known photograph taken at the 1902 Beethoven exhibition. Let's face it, none of them look especially plebian, not even Gustav Klimt, sitting on a throne in his dress-reform robe. (Moll is reclining far right with Emil Orlik next to him and Moser is sitting in front of Klimt).



It was only a year later that the Wiener Werkstaette was formed by Hoffman and Moser. In a similar style, Moll took up colour woodcuts, still only five years old as a medium for modern artists. The print showing the Hohe Warte in 1903 (at the top) was one of the earliest. I'm not sure whether this snow scene, below, comes from that first 1903 batch, possibly not, but it also shows the Hohe Warte where Moll lived. It's a fine print, expressive of a way of life where design counted down to the last detail.

You can see the terrace of his house above the trees in this painting. (He also made a print looking up at the house with its clipped bay trees but it was unavailable for use here). The combination of warm and cool tones, of growing things and a severity of design is something we would still accept even today as contemporary.

The photograph below was taken just round the corner - you can see the same chairs and the same rendering and brickwork on the house. Moll himself is seated at the centre, the teacher and stage-designer, Alfred Roller, is on his left and of course that is Gustav Mahler, his son-in-law, behind him. Hoffman was also present that day and it was around this time that the Secession split (in 1905, to be exact). If Moll had produced his first woodcuts in response to the founding of the Wiener Werkstaette, his second series was certainly published by them. His 'Ten woodcuts' portfolio of 1908 didn't contain the kind of prints that were numbered and marked handdruck but I assume they were produced in time for the great Kunstschau organised by the Secession in the same year (as I think LH Jungnickel's first animal prints were). They may have been tired of the unexciting marketplace the Kunstlerhaus had become but opportunities to exhibit and sell their work in a city with very few galleries were important. (You won't be surprised to learn that Moll was also a director of the Gallery Mietkhe for a time).

He also travelled, to Italy, of course, where I think the subject for this woodcut must come from. In some ways, it's another version of the Hohe Warte. On their own, they don't have alot of appeal to a modern audience used to woodcuts in the Japanese manner. He knew Orlik as we've seen but he didn't follow him. He appeared to take up woodcut with something specific in mind because he stopped making them after 1908.

The next house he built was never the subject for a print, so far as I know. But many of the prints are strong on architectural subject matter and this is one of their features that make them so typical of what they were all attempting at the time - to inter-relate the disciplines. Fine art, design, architecture, even music, as in the Beethoven exhibition. In Moll's case, it may have produced woodcuts that might strike us as arid today but they are worth looking at more closely, particularly the very first one.

Their use of light, shadow, perspective, linearity and particularly overprinting, are are quite novel and well-thought out. Moll wasn't a young man trying a medium that had just been rediscovered; he was an established artist, doing something new and, in many ways, relevant: presenting a view of urban life as well-ordered, interconnected and liveable, not a bad aim, after all, and one we still respond to.