Three almost unknown total works of art can currently be discovered in Vienna's Museum Leopold.
The first is the reconstructed equipment of the Villa Rothberger in 1912 by the architect Otto Prutscher in the Biedermeier town of Baden near Vienna, with paintings, furniture and thousands of movable objects.
The second total work of art is the translocation of the two hundred most beautiful pieces of this collection, which the owner couple Fritz and Hermi Schedlmayer have brought together over decades, which in their cleverly curated new compilation in the museum conveys a lively impression of how the "Vienna around 1900" shown in the same house on an individual basis penetrated all areas of life.
Finally, the third total work of art is the painting collection of the two Schedlmayers, which is unique in this composition.
Stefan Trinks
Editor in the Feuilleton.
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Money and expertise for this were plentiful.
Fritz Schedlmayer, who died in 2013, sold diagnostics for nuclear medicine, Hermi from Transylvania, who followed him in 2018, wrote books about Prutscher, who stood in the shadow of the heroes of Viennese modern architecture, Koloman Moser and Josef Hoffmann, who bought their villa in 1989 right down to the handles of the dining room elevator, the painting and furnishing of the rooms and the last plant of the garden.
The total work of art’s mania of not leaving a single square centimeter of the residents’ house and body unshaped – in some cases reform clothes were designed for them – goes far: Prutscher’s designs for the villa’s Christmas decorations are just the tip of the ice tree.
Nevertheless, he always corresponds to the wishes of the client as far as possible, adapts his forms to the local and to the strong Biedermeier tradition of Vienna, is a design man without qualities.
His most famous product reveals this: A Prutschersche stem glass, produced since 1907, fetched 14,500 euros years ago.
Its stem consists of stacked cubes of clear and colored glass that mock any glass blower physics, so it is recognizable as an extreme homage to the so-called Quadratl-Hoffmann of the Viennese design elite.
However, the shape and cut of the stem glass goblet cites the popular Viennese Biedermeier glasses.
In the Leopold Museum, the traditionally modern Wunderkammer glass is presented like a relic together with the rest of Prutscher's ever-changing interior design.
In the third of the four halls, the Schedlmayer collection of paintings is then exhibited, not without being loosened up again and again by interspersed pieces of furniture in the sense of the epoch rooms of large museums, just as the paintings in the villa were not hung in a sterile white cube, but with lived for them.
And bathed, because a particularly magnificent work of symbolism, the "Sinnende" by the Swiss in Munich, Adolf Frey-Moock, hung in the bathroom for decades without the clouds of bath vapors having caused any visible damage - you have to imagine life in the Gesamtkunstwerk as in the Munich Villa Stuck, where the many pictures in the smoking room were also permanently shrouded in clouds of nicotine and incense.
A yoke of color on the shoulders
Top works of Expressionism such as the large pastel "Seated woman in front of an oven (Erna)" by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner from 1913 or bathers by his colleagues Erich Heckel and Otto Mueller can be found here.
What is really exciting for German eyes, however, are the discoveries to be made within Austrian modernity.
By Austrian standards, the collection may be stylistically moderate, to a certain extent a compromise modern: the human form is always recognizable, the laws of composition still apply.
Painters like the Carinthian Franz Wiegele take amazing liberties with the details.