Jugendstil Women and the Making of Modern Design

(Hardback)

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Jugendstil, that is Germanys distinct engagement with the international Art Nouveau movement, is now firmly engrained in histories of modern art, architecture and design. Recent exhibitions and publications across the world explored Jugendstils key protagonists and artistic centres to firmly anchor their activities within the trajectories of German modernism. Women, however, continue to be largely absent from these revisionist accounts. Jugendstil Women and the Making of Modern Design argues that women in fact actively participated in the cultural and socio-economic exchanges that generated German design responses to European modernity. By drawing on previously unpublished archival material and a series of original case studies including Elsa Bruckmann's Munich salon, the Photo Studio Elvira and the Debschitz School, the book explores womens important contributions to modern German culture as collectors, consumers, critics, designers, educators, and patrons. This book offers a new interpretation of this vibrant period by considering diverse manifestations of historical female agency that pushed against historically entrenched conventions and gender roles. The books rigorous approach reshapes Jugendstil historiography by positing womens lived experiences against dominant ideologies that emerged at this precise moment. In short, the book advocates women as an integral part of the emergence, dissemination and reception of Jugendstil and questions the deeply gendered histories of this key period in modern art, architecture and design.

Reviews

Discussing many actors not widely known outside specialist circles, Sabine Wieber demonstrates the important roles women played not only in questions of design and creative practice, but also in social and political reforms, feminism, and education...The structure of the book is well-conceived to consider the broader categories beyond artist or designer, allowing Wieber to weave a narrative around complex social and political questions without falling into tropes of design icons or individual hagiographies. -- Journal of Design History
This book goes beyond an exercise in writing forgotten women back into the history of the Jugendstil movement. Sabine Wieber explores the complex reality of women's design practice, education, patronage and taste-making and embeds in the realities of economic survival, inter-personal relationships, legal frameworks and the persistence of gendered thinking that circumscribed their lives and implacably erased their contributions from the historical record. -- Charlotte Ashby, Associate Lecturer in Art and Design History at Birkbeck, University of London, UK
Lucidly written and packed with groundbreaking archival research, Jugendstil Women and the Making of Modern Design is a revolutionary investigation of a foundational but often misunderstood modernist movement. Sabine Wieber restores a range of essential yet largely forgotten female figures to a breathtakingly new history of Jugendstil art, craft, interior design, and fashion as well as its diverse manifestations in pedagogy, patronage and activism. -- Elizabeth Otto, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, The University at Buffalo, State University of New York, USA
In this groundbreaking book, Sabine Wieber offers a much-needed corrective to male-centered narratives of Jugendstil. In detailed case studies that elaborate womens contributions as designers, makers, teachers, patrons, activists and salonniers to a distinctly German variant of Art Nouveau, she both illuminates the important and very diverse roles that women played in the inception of this modern style and demonstrates the varied ways in which they used it to secure a place of increased personal, socio-economic and political power in the late German Empire. Historically and geographically specific to turn-of-the-century Munich, Jugendstil Women and the Making of Modern Design is a must-read revisionist history of modernism that does not simply supplement the narrative with women but questions the underlying structures of its historiography. -- Maria Makela, Professor Emerita of Visual Studies, California College of the Arts, USA

Author Bio

Sabine Wieber is a Lecturer in History of Art at the University of Glasgow, UK.