The school of the Austrian Museum, our School of Applied Art, has been showing the achievements of the last school year since the 9th of this month. Again we see the usual works, executed with the usual precision, to familiar acclaim in the daily newspapers. And indeed, when we stand in Ferstel’s solid Italian rooms and consider the still-lifes, the flower paintings, nudes, pictures of the saints, scenes in the style of Tadema, portraits, statues, reliefs, woodcuts, drawings for furniture publications, etc., etc., even the harshest critic among us would be forced to conclude: much has been achieved here. In the school on the Stubenring, painting, sculpture and the graphic arts have something like a secondary Academy. Our Art College on Schillerplatz has a competitor, and even if the accomplishments of that institution cannot be surpassed, because the period of study is too short, this worthy competition has beneficial results. Thus Schillerplatz gets a sharp reminder that it needs to rouse itself from its state of stagnation, and Stubenring turns out second-rate artists. So, one might think, no one should object. That is wrong. Because this race is being run at the expense of something else. And that is applied art, craft.

Let us say it straight out: because of this way of behaving, the applied arts are being actually betrayed. The small sum which, according to the budget for the Ministry of Education, is allocated to education in the applied arts is entirely inadequate for its purpose. We Austrians, who in this regard should be penny-pinchingly frugal because of the inadequate funds, are letting our arts and crafts starve and die at the cost of ‘great art’.

This injustice has been committed over the centuries with no one to advocate for our betrayed crafts. For our craftsmen the secret has long been in the open: the workers emerging from this institution are useless for the workshop, for life, for the public. Stuffed full of wrong ideas, without knowledge of material, with a fine sense of imminent nobility, without knowledge of contemporary trends, they either add to the large number of minor painters and sculptors or go abroad to make up for the shortcomings of our own education, if the possibility of assimilation exists. But then they are lost to us. We ourselves cannot take them into the school, we are not strong enough. On the contrary: we expect this institution to provide a stimulus that should set us in motion.

Because we have stagnated for a long time and we are stagnating still. Over the last decade the whole world of the applied arts has taken great strides under England’s leadership. The distance between us and everyone else is becoming ever greater, and it is high time that we took care not to miss our connection. Even Germany has been catching up at a gallop and will soon be joining the victory procession. Such new life abroad! The painters, the sculptors, the architects are leaving their comfortable studios, hanging ‘high art’ on the peg and taking their place by the anvil, the loom, the potter’s wheel, the kiln and the carpenter’s bench! Away with all drawing, away with all paper-based art! What we need to do now is to wrest new forms and lines from life, habits, comfort and utility! Get to it, journeymen, art is something that must be overcome!

In view of this constantly growing enthusiasm for the arts and crafts movement we must deeply regret the fact that our artistic youth stands coldly and apathetically aside. Even those with a calling for it flirt with the fine arts, as we have seen. The reverse, artists returning to craft, is of course not taking place. Is there really so little propensity for enthusiasm among your young people?

But the few works in the exhibition which refer to applied art can already give us an answer to this question. It is as if the pupil’s own soul were being drawn, corrected, built, modelled and taught out of his body and replaced by a rigid dogma. Nature is studied – but without success. Because for the applied arts this study is only a means to an end. But the end that is to be reached is that of stylizing what is present in nature, or rather making it useful to the material from which it is to be formed. But the school lacks the courage and strength as well as the knowledge of material. But the dogma that will inevitably destroy this school is the view that our arts and crafts should be reformed from the top down, from the studio. But revolutions always come from below. And that ‘below’ is the workshop.

The view still prevails here that the design of a chair should only be entrusted to someone who knows the five orders of columns off by heart. Such a man, I think, would primarily be bound to know something about sitting. But so be it: if it does no good it does no harm either. But no advantage will come from a chair composed in the wrong order of columns. Here I am referring to the entasis of a Doric order, which is constructed like a Roman column. That is a real slap in the face for the Doric spirit. But let us go further than that. The furniture designers who achieve outstanding work as designers of advertisements, a skill that must surely fall within the sphere of graphic art, fail entirely where their own designs are concerned. Ignorance of materials when it comes to copying details from nature – we need only consider mouldings that run counter to the techniques of cabinet-making – and dull copying, what experts call plagiarism, in the drawings for the decorations of internal spaces are the common features of all three specialist studios in our school. It is not the teacher who should be considered at fault here: it is the spirit that hovers over the whole institution.

We can’t help repeating what we have said already. There is proficient work here too, as long as we only address the subject of painting. When it comes to the applied arts, the best drawings fizzle out. Naturalistically drawn pumpkins, to take one example – cleanly and very vividly shaded – do not do the job, particularly when they are conceived as a wallpaper frieze just below the ceiling; one would not be overly keen to venture into such an unfortunate room for fear that they might fall on one’s head. It is proficient drawing that guarantees the perpetuation of this illusion …

We might continue in this way, sheet after sheet, but this one example will probably bear sufficient witness to the thoughtlessness that sees no further than the end of the drawing-board.

We may cling to the hope that this will have been the last exhibition of its kind. At last unto craft will have been rendered the things that are craft’s. With the new director, Privy Councillor Arthur von Scala,¹ a new spirit has entered the building. May this spirit be strong and reckless enough to be master of the house towards the old. Austrian craft expects no less.