At the Forefront of a Newly Emerging Profession? Ethnography, Education and the Exhibition of Women's Needlework in Austria-Hungary in the Late Nineteenth Century

Abstract

The exhibition of women's needlework in Vienna at world's fairs and other venues coincided with the widespread reform of the decorative arts industries in Austria-Hungary in the late nineteenth century, which led to the establishment of the new Museums of Applied Art in both Vienna and Budapest, as well as to a host of museums and vocational craft schools throughout the lands of the Dual Monarchy. The aim of the regional craft schools—to draw attention to and preserve the vital folk art of the Austrian peasantry, while simultaneously improving and regulating its production in the form of cottage industries—intersected with an effort to train and educate bourgeois and aristocratic ladies in the urban decorative arts schools. As Austria attempted to define its place as a leader in the applied arts industries, women's needlework took on a central role. Indeed, the preoccupation with feminine fabrication of the domestic sphere, and especially the production of traditional and ‘dilettante’ needlework, among Austrian critics such as Rudolf von Eitelberger, Jacob von Falke and Alois Riegl, largely shaped the emerging profession of modern interior design at the turn of the twentieth century.