Emilie Floge is well remembered today, not only for her relationship with [Gustave] Klimt, but also being among Vienna’s most exclusive couturiers between 1904 and 1938. Schwestern Floge was established in 1904 by Emilie, Helene and their eldest sister Pauline. This fashion salon was an enterprise that Klimt was personally involved. In “Portrait of Emilie Floge” the loose fitting style of the dress worn by Emilie was, at the time, advocated by the Dress Reform Movement. In 1897, Klimt and many of his friends founded their group the Secession, with Klimt as their president and a goal to reinvigorate Austrian art. Klimt’s interest in clothing reform was closely connected to the Secession’s call for creative involvement in all aspects of decorative arts. Not only did Klimt design dresses for Emilie but her range of folk textiles influenced the colourful, abstracted patterns found in his paintings.
Sue Hubbard reviews the Klimt exhibition at the Tate Liverpool:
The Wiener Werkstätte (“Viennese workshops”), started by the architect Josef Hoffmann, the designer Koloman Moser and the financier Fritz Wärndorfer, under the influence of Klimt, wanted to set up “a productive co-operative society of artist-craftsmen”. Yet despite lip service to the ideals of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement, there was no political agenda here, no agonising over the destiny of mankind. Art may have been regarded as a surrogate religion in a secular society, but it was a church that only the rich could afford to join. Mass production was, after all, for the masses.
The Wiener Werkstätte was elitist from the start, believing that it was “better to spend ten days on one thing than to produce ten things in one day”. It was a reaction against the new industrialised processes that were churning out factory-made household goods and was, from the first, a movement that embraced only the few. An early marketing ploy by the fine Scottish craftsman Charles Rennie Mackintosh, to whom the founders turned for advice, was to encourage his Viennese colleagues to think in terms of “a brand” that would be known for “its individuality, beauty and precision”. Every piece would be produced for a “specific purpose and place”.
Just as much as Conran is today, this was art as a lifestyle choice. The meticulously designed interiors, with their matching cabinets and chairs, sugar bowls, light fittings, gorgeous cutlery and crafted loo-paper holders, all spoke of informed good taste. Even Klimt’s tiepin and cufflinks, along with the jewellery he gave Emilie for Christmas, were made by the Wiener Werkstätte. But slowly this utopian vision of an aesthetic wholeness began to turn inward, away from any notion that this art might really be for general consumption by the Volk. In 1901 Hoffmann wrote that it was “no longer possible to convert the masses. Thus it is all the more urgent to satisfy the few who appeal to us.” His talk of “a sense of priestly dignity” smacked of solipsism. [more]
mirabile dictu 