The present work, an exquisitely crafted Card Case (Spielkartenkassette) designed by the leader of the Wiener Werkstätte Josef Hoffmann and his eminent associate Carl Otto Czeschka for one of the movement’s primary patrons Karl Wittgenstein, thoroughly encapsulates the avant-garde impulses of Viennese craft at the turn of the twentieth century. Designed alongside a Games Table made for Wittgenstein that was likely part of a commission for his palace residence in Vienna, the present work exemplifies the meticulous craftsmanship and attention to fine detail that the Wiener Werkstätte championed, clad in sumptuous materials and carved to perfection. Not only were the Games Table and Card Case displayed together at the showroom of the Wiener Werkstätte in Vienna, the present Card Case was one of the select few objects displayed at the Kunstschau Wien 1908, the preeminent exhibition of the Vienna Secession and a crowning achievement for the movement’s and the country’s leaders.
In 1897, when many progressive Viennese artists including Gustav Klimt, Koloman Moser, and Josef Hoffmann founded the Vienna Secession to counter the rigid institutionalization of the fine arts, it signaled an entirely new era of modernism in the country. The Wiener Werkstätte was founded six years later in 1903, when Hoffmann and Moser sought to distinguish the design portion of the Secession and seek more control over all aspects of creation and production, establishing teams of talented craftsmen to execute their designs. As the Werkstätte expanded, their priority shifted towards creating entire interiors based on what German composer Richard Wagner termed the Gestamkunstwerk, the total work of art, of which the present lot is an exceptional manifestation.
The Wittgenstein family was at the forefront of this new movement. Karl Wittgenstein, a steel tycoon and one of the wealthiest men in Europe, with a passion for architecture and the decorative arts, was the driving force behind a number of notable architectural landmarks such as the Hochreith Hunting Lodge, which included one of the three specially designed Games Tables. Karl Wittgenstein had close ties to New York and was a friend of Andrew Carnegie. His daughter Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein married the American Jerome Stonborough, a physician with familial ties to the Guggenheim family, whom she had met in Vienna. Margaret would become an important patron of the movement in her own right, posing for Gustav Klimt in 1905 and commissioning her brother, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and the architect Paul Engelman in 1926 to build the notable Haus Wittgenstein in Vienna. When Margaret and Jerome moved to Berlin, Karl Wittgenstein commissioned the interior of their apartment to be decorated by Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser.
Throughout their lives, the family maintained close ties with members of the Wiener Werkstätte, financially supporting the movement and assembling an important collection of art and precious objects. Margaret eventually inherited ownership of the present box, which she took with her to the United States where she emigrated in 1940. She sold the object herself in 1949, just a few years before her passing in 1958.
Josef Hoffmann and Carl Otto Czeschka collaborated on many pieces throughout their time together at the Wiener Werkstätte. The present box, one of the most significant achievements of the duo’s yearslong collaborative pursuits, captures the movement’s insistence on creating a total work of art in all aspects of their craft. The four corners of the box, which mirror the gilt reliefs also designed by Czeschka to adorn the corners of the Games Table, feature ornately carved depictions of each of the four playing-card suits. Originally drawn on paper and then executed by the masterfully skilled craftsmen of the Wiener Werkstätte, Czeschka’s hand-drawn studies for each of the four playing-card kings now reside in the collection of the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna (fig. 3). The designs came about at a time when Czeschka was increasingly interested in depicting medieval figures of chivalry, particularly as it related to Austro-Hungarian imperial might and the romantic ideal of the noble knight, a motif seen here on the corner suit panels of both the box and table. Each figure is exquisitely detailed and carved of gilt bronze, embellished with elements of ivory and mother of pearl to add to their elegant allure. The rest of the box is made up of a structure of macassar ebony adorned with shimmering plates of mother of pearl, tiled on all four sides and inset between delicately carved borders that separate the suits from all four sides. Crowning the box and holding what would have been a collection of playing cards is a subtly convex brass top, masterfully unifying the gilded corner suits and signifying the box’s status as a real Gestamkunstwerk in and of itself.
Further speaking to its importance within the oeuvre of Hoffmann, Czeschka, and the Wiener Werkstätte at large, the present work was one of the few pieces selected by the group’s leaders to be exhibited in the Kunstschau Wien 1908, a major exhibition organized by Gustav Klimt to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of Emperor Francis Joseph I’s reign in Austria. The exhibition was conceived of as the defining moment for the artistic achievements of the members of the Austrian art milieu since the establishment of the Secession eleven years prior, and featured some of the movement’s most iconic works, including the first public unveiling of Klimt’s iconic 1907 painting The Kiss. In correspondence between Czeschka and Fritz Wärndorfer, a founder and financier of the Wiener Werkstätte, Wärndorfer details his first-hand accounts of the Kunstschau to the designer, remarking that “The exhibition is the most stimulating, the most astonishing achievement that one can experience. Of course, there is no city in the world today that can put on an exhibition like this” (Translated from German in Heinz Spielmann, Carl Otto Czeschka: Ein Wiener Künstler in Hamburg, Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen, Germany, 2019, pp. 98). Wärndorfer continues on to describe the contents of Room 50, the Wiener Werkstätte’s dedicated exhibition hall, which was punctuated by what many refer to as the movement’s pinnacle work – The Wittgenstein Vitrine. Also designed by Czeschka and purchased by Karl Wittgenstein from this very exhibition, the masterpiece now resides in the collection of the Dallas Museum of Art and features many distinguishable similarities to the present work. The Card Case was featured directly across the vitrine in a display cabinet that contained some of the movement’s finest works, as elucidated by Wärndorfer:
“In the middle of the hall is the glass display case [the Wittgenstein Vitrine], which looks fabulous. Otherwise there is nothing in the room and only the five built-in cabinets containing the best things we have made…In the third compartment is the Wittgenstein Kartenkassette [the present Card Case] and the new one, behind it your fan, and right at the top the gilded attachments” (ibid., pp. 98-99).
A genuinely one-of-a-kind marriage of craftsmanship, history, and provenance, the present work represents the rare opportunity to acquire an exceedingly important and unique masterwork of Wiener Werkstätte created by two of the century’s earliest champions.