As co-founder of the Wiener Werkstätten, the Vienna Secession and the German and Austrian Werkbund his name is anchored in the history of modern architecture and design: Josef Hoffmann (1870-1956). Being a total designer he gave as much thought to small items like a sugar bowl as he did to furniture and buildings. Accordingly his oeuvre, realized over six decades, is massive and diverse both in range and idiom. Buildings like the Purkersdorf Sanatorium (1904/05), the Palais Stoclet (1905-11) or the Austrian Pavilion for the Venice Biennale (1934) just like the Sitzmaschine (1905) or Kubus (1905) armchairs are milestones of early modernism that paved the way for countless successors. With a pandemic-related delay the MAK Vienna in December 2021 opened the as of yet most comprehensive exhibition of Hoffmann’s work, bringing together more than 1,000 individual items. It is accompanied by an equally comprehensive, eponymous publication: „Josef Hoffmann - Fortschritt durch Schönheit“, published last year by Birkhäuser. The 456 page tome contains some 40 lavishly illustrated essays by eminent experts and an extensive biography that shed new light on Hoffmann’s entire career, from his student years at Vienna Academy over his teaching at Kunstgewerbeschule Wien, his situation during the Nazi era up to very late work as architect, curator and witness of modernism. A matter of peculiar interest are the very differentiated analyses of his involvement with Austrofascism. Hoffmann surely wasn’t apolitical and had high hopes for the regime to strengthen the importance of the crafts but was consecutively edged aside by Albert Speer who disliked the “Viennese style”. Nevertheless Hoffmann was commissioned to design the „Haus der Wehrmacht“, complete with furniture and stylized Swastikas.
As the latter episode reveals „Fortschritt durch Schönheit“ in covering the entirety of Josef Hoffmann’s life and work leaves no question unanswered and shows him as a man with the single-minded but egalitarian vision to advance progress through beauty.