In honor of International Women’s Day, the ACF DC invites you to join acclaimed art historian Dr. Megan Brandow-Faller for a talk on her recent book "The Female Secession", which examines the intersection of art, feminism and the decorative in Secessionist and interwar Vienna. This is a virtual event in the form of a Zoom meeting. Registration is required.
THE BOOK
The artists of interwar Vienna’s ‘female Secession’ created craft-based artworks that rocked the established conventions surrounding ‘feminine’ handcraft, reclaiming women’s connections to devalued handcraft genres. Strongly represented in the well-known ‘Vienna Workshops’ (1903-1932), these ‘female Secessionists’ experimented with similar ideas and movements (expressionism, cubism, primitivism and abstraction) as male artists, overturning women’s unofficial exclusion from the ‘fine’ arts of painting and sculpture. The provocative work of artists like Vally Wieselthier, Emmy Zweybrück, or Fanny Harlfinger in ceramics, toymaking, textiles and interior design disrupted long-established boundaries by working to dislodge fixed oppositions between “art” and “craft,” “decorative” and “profound,” and “masculine” and “feminine” in art. In a very real way, their reclaiming of ‘feminine’ handcraft and matriarchal modes of transmission formed a woman-centered lineage anticipating those of the 1970s feminist art collectives and present-day craftivism. At a time when ‘DIY’ crafts are more popular than ever, The Female Secession could not be more relevant today.
THE AUTHOR
Megan Brandow-Faller is Professor of History at the City University of New York (CUNY) Kingsborough and also teaches at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research focuses on art and design in Secessionist and interwar Vienna, including children’s art and artistic toys of the Vienna Secession; expressionist ceramics of the Wiener Werkstätte; folk art and modernism; and women’s art education. She is the editor of Childhood by Design: Toys and the Material Culture of Childhood, 1700-present (Bloomsbury 2018) and the author of The Female Secession: Art and the Decorative at the Viennese Women’s Academy (Penn State University Press, 2020) and co-editor (with Laura Morowitz) of Erasures and Eradications in Modern Viennese Art Architecture and Design (Routledge, Forthcoming). Brandow-Faller was pleased to contribute two catalogue essay for the forthcoming retrospective exhibition Die Frauen der Wiener Werkstätte at Vienna’s Museum of Applied Arts (opening 2021). Her newest project focuses on the dissemination and popularization of Secessionist ideas of child creativity in postwar America.