From Publishers Weekly
"Decadent" is the first word that comes to mind when confronted with the decorative arts of this intense art-for-art's-sake modernist, who stripped belle epoque Art Nouveau down to clean modernist lines while often playfully relegating function to afterthought. Austria designer Peche was born in 1887, just as Art Nouveau was taking off, and died of cancer at 36, in 1923, as post-WWI modernism hit its apogee. Through his association with the "Vienna Workshops," a design company, he left behind hauntingly clean-lined frivolities that still have the power to shock. Seen here in 360 color and 140 b&w illustrations are Peche's 1921 square-with-exploding-diamond-shaped gold gilt Frame for an Enamel Picture, which would easily overpower whatever enamel work one cared to put in it; the double-heart-shaped back and striped velour seat of Side Chair for the Dining Room in the Apartment of Wolko Gartenberg, which seem invitingly unsittable; and the tall, thin, plant-like Lidded Container, festooned with a single leaf spring and nugget of cracked wheat, which nevertheless doesn't seem like it holds much in the way of food. The book was produced as the catalogue for an exhibition now at New York's Neue Galerie Museum for German and Austrian Art, a jewel-box-like space backed by Ronald Lauder and others, and it features 14 short essays, most rather useless (particularly the maddeningly coy and incomplete biographical chronology), along with reproductions of Peche's magnificent hand-written love letters to a mistress.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Booklist
This beautifully illustrated book is the first monographic treatment in English of an Austrian artist/designer who was a key figure in the Wiener Werkstatte (Vienna Craft Studio), a workshop that produced furniture and decorative objects from artist-made designs. Founded in 1903, the Wiener Werkstatte remained in operation until 1932.
Dagobert Peche (1887-1923) studied architecture, went into the decorative arts, and joined the Wiener Werkstatte in 1915, and as this book attests, he designed gorgeous luxuries in fin-de-siecle styles. Dagobert Peche and the Wiener Werkstatte is the print documentation of a rare exhibition of Peche's work that was seen in Vienna (1998) and New York (2000), and it contains a short biography, scholarly essays, and an illustrated catalog of the artist's distinctive furnishings, mirror frames, metalwork, ceramics, glass, textiles, wallpaper, and much more. Victor Cassidy
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