The fate of 3,000 original drawings and sketches of the Wiener Werkstatte was unknown until Mr. Backhausen's discovery.
BORN AGAIN: HOFFMANN'S LOST TEXTILES
The day the original fabric designs of the Wiener Werkstatte were rediscovered is woven into Peter Backhausen's memory. The sinuous geometrics of Josef Hoffmann, the fanciful floral patterns of Koloman Moser were lying untouched until the mid-1970's in an old wooden cupboard in an empty office building on the Kaiserstrasse, the place that had once housed the drawing department of Johann Backhausen & Sohne.
''It was like God saved them for us,'' Mr. Backhausen says. That the designs had survived at all was a miracle. Destroyed during World War II were the mills and showroom of Backhausen. This was the family-run company founded in 1849 that produced the original textiles for the Wiener Werkstatte, the Viennese design collaborative founded by Hoffmann and Koloman Moser in 1903. The fate of 3,000 original drawings and sketches of the Wiener Werkstatte was unknown until Mr. Backhausen's discovery. Before then there hadn't been much impetus for rescuing them. After the war and until recently ''these design ideas were forgotten,'' says Mr. Backhausen. Today the Wiener Werkstatte style flourishes with renewed appreciation in everything from the highly acclaimed ''Vienna 1900: Architecture and Design'' exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art to carpets at Barneys New York Women's Store.
Mr. Backhausen was prompted to search for the lost drawings and sketches in the mid-1970s at the request of Franz Wittmann, a Viennese furniture manufacturer, who was looking for fabrics to accompany reproductions of Hoffmann furniture. Recollections by longtime workers of the Backhausen factory drew him to the old building. The yellow graph paper drawings and sketches, the fraying green scrapbooks ''were covered with centimeters of dust,'' says Mr. Backhausen, whose great-great-grandfather founded the company. ''We looked at these designs and every other word was 'fantastic,' '' he says. ''They were beautiful, fantastically modern. We thank God they lived through the war.''
That they did has been a boon to art historians and Johann Backhausen & Sohne, now run by Peter Backhausen, 54 years old, and his sons Reinhard, 26, and Herbert, 24. The only remaining continuously operating textile company from this heady period of artistic creativity, Backhausen is legal heir to many of the designs it produced for the Werkstatte around 1900. The name Hoffmann - always with the title Professor preceding it - is spoken at Backhausen in reverential tones. Werkstatte designs today account for nearly 40 percent of the firm's $14 million a year business, much of it exported to to-the-trade-only fabric houses such as Unika Vaev, a division of International Contract Furnishings, and Ian Wall, both in New York.
In Vienna, Backhausen is everywhere. There is a lavish showroom on the Karntnerstrasse, where pedestrians stroll and the Christmasy shop windows glisten. Backhausen fabrics fit snugly in the smoky interiors of many of the city's coffeehouses: Beidermeier at the Cafe Landtmann, Koloman Moser at Cafe Sirk. Predictably, given the current Vienna vogue, Backhausen reproductions of Wiener Werkstatte fabrics are brought in to recreate Art Nouveau interiors for brash new hotels such as the Vienna Marriott.
- Dig deeper into the moment.
Kirk Varnedoe, curator of the ''Vienna 1900'' exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, says the presence of the Backhausen archive is remarkable. ''Unlike many other firms, they appreciate what they've got,'' Mr. Varnadoe says. ''These designs were meant to be out in public and in production. It's heartening that that's still happening.''
More remarkable, perhaps, is the firm's dual role as company and curator. Although not on public display, the archive is a treasured resource both for the company's product - fabrics, carpets, damasks, brocades and tapestries - and for architects and historians, who flock to view the firm's musty sample books and drawings now under lock and key at the Backhausen showroom, itself poetically situated on the site of the famous Fledermaus Cabaret.
The sample books contain original squares of fabric and weaving instructions (''Sixty picks per minute'' for one Hoffmann design). Out of 3,000 original Wiener Werkstatte designs about 150 are currently produced by Backhausen. Viewed in comparison with other Backhausen fabrics, including rococo brocades and rustic farmhouse rugs, they seem strikingly contemporary.
Computerized looms now weave the once hand-woven Wiener Werkstatte patterns, droning in the kind of repetitive rhythms one associates with a washing machine rinse cycle. The Backhausen mill lies a few miles from the Czechoslovakian border, near Hoheneich in lower Austria, in flat, misty country dotted by fir trees.
Most designs are reproduced according to the designers' original weave and color specifications, but there is a certain amount of creative interpretation. Like many fabric mills, Backhausen updates designs for the contemporary market. Purists might not approve of Josef Hoffman's trademark black-white-and-gray designs executed in new designer colors.
Hoffmann's ''Harlequin,'' for example, produced in black-white-and-gray at the turn of the century, is now sold in its original colors as well as green-and-beige. The designs are produced in wool, cotton and rayon for the United States. Sina Pearson, the president of Unika Vaev, is working with Backhausen's staff designers to produce bright and clear colors for the American market, based on original hues such as teal, fuchsia and bright blue. Ms. Pearson notes that although black, white and gray are well-known Wiener Werkstatte colors, other hues of the period were extremely vibrant. These included sharp green accents and teal with raspberry and gold highlights reminiscent of Gustav Klimt - coincidentally the same colors that are popular today.
But, notes Mr. Varnadoe, ''Some are colors Hoffmann himself would never have envisaged. Backhausen is trying to strike a balance between being true to tradition and a commercial enterprise.''
Among the Backhausen family members, for whom tradition is passed ''from son to son to son to son,'' as Peter Backhausen puts it, a balance with history seems to have been struck. This is aided by clients such as the 85-year-old Jacques Stoclet, whose house, the 1905 Palais Stoclet in Brussels, is widely considered to be Hoffmann's masterwork. For Mrs. Stoclet, Backhausen developed reproductions to supplement Hoffmann's original fabric designs.
Reinhard Backhausen spent two months reorganizing the fragile archive to accommodate such historic work. Surrounded by delicate pen-and-ink drawings, many with the original artists' signatures or monograms, ''You begin to think you live in this period,'' he says. ''It's a very special feeling. You know Professor Hoffmann held these in his hand.''
Comments
Post a Comment