Franz Čižek was a pioneering figure in the realm of Central European progressive pedagogy. His courses were designed to foster and nurture the creative potential of children and young adults, providing them with a diverse range of techniques and materials to explore and experiment with. Čižek also encouraged joint discussions among his students, allowing them to share their ideas and insights with one another. Some of the aforementioned designers studied with him and incorporated his ideas into their own pedagogical practice. For instance, Erika Giovanna Klien developed his teaching methods in the US after emigration. In our online series Julia Harasimovicz has devoted her paper to the Popularization of art from the Franz Čižek class by female charity workers. Additionally, our colleague Megan Brandow-Faller has recently undertaken a project that focuses on the dissemination and popularization of Secessionist ideas of child creativity in postwar America, including the influence of Franz Čižek.

Stefanie: Yes, as part of the exhibition Lill Tschudi and Franz Čižek. A delightful sort of game (at the University Gallery of Angewandte until December 16^th 2023) we started to conduct research on Erika Giovanna Klien and Elisabeth Karlinsky, who had studied with Čižek in Vienna. As preserved letters show, both of them corresponded with him after their immigration to the U.S. During their student years in Vienna in the early 1920s, both attended Franz Čižek’s course in Ornamental Morphology. At that time, Čižek’s course was mandatory for every new student as a part of their first year. Interestingly, this  “class” originates in an introductory course for the application of ornaments on (designed) everyday objects – a realm where women students were tolerated earlier than in that of the fine arts – however, due to Čižek’s specific notion of the ornament as a veritable locus of non-mimetic expression, it became a veritable artistic laboratory, where contemporary avantgarde practices, as well as bodywork and rhythm, were explored, thereby dismantling the dichotomy between fine and applied arts. This aspect of Čižek’s pedagogical approach exerted a profound impact on the work of Klien and Karlinsky, both of whom went on to further develop Čižek’s principles. Notably, they evinced a keen interest in connecting his pedagogical methods with psychoanalysis. Following the completion of their studies, Čižek recommended Klien and Karlinsky to teach at the Elizabeth Duncan School in Kleßheim near Salzburg. In the late 1920s, both artists migrated to the United States and began teaching at various schools in New York, including the New School for Social Research, the Dalton School, the Walt Whitman School (Klien), and the Walden School (Karlinsky). Klien also theorized her pedagogical approach and produced a large manuscript that is now part of the university collection.
Franz Čižek has written a book on his pedagogical endeavours and methods, that is now lost. Thus, his concepts – which do not indicate a clear methodology that ties his principles together coherently – subsist in the form of two memories, which themselves must be analysed carefully. One is a partially completed CV by his former assistant Ada Schimitzek, which contains aspirations towards national socialist language and ideology, indicating that it was meant to be published. The other is a transcript of an interview that one of his former students, Leopold Wolfgang Rochowanski, conducted with him during the Second World War. In the interview Čižek seems to be more ambiguous.

Eva: A lot of texts on and lectures by Čižek were first published in Great Britain and the US thanks to the pedagogue, writer and refugee relief worker Francesca Wilson as well as the Junior Red Cross‘ general secretary Wilhelm Viola, who published  two monographs on Child Art. This is noteworthy because it shaped the reception of Čižek’s work and strengthened the international ties of the class and lead to multiple exhibitions in the English-speaking world during the 1920s and 30s.

Do you think there’s a difference in researching male and female designers? Is one gender easier to research than the other?

Eva: Definitely. The first rather obvious factor creating a discrepancy is that men historically kept their last names, while female biographies are fractured by marriage.

Stefanie: Most women artists faced difficulties related to reproductive labour and gender-related discrimination. Additionally, as we already mentioned, women artists had different experiences when it came to studying and producing art. They were not allowed to study at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna until the late 1920s, which meant that they were often not recognized as legitimate artists with their own careers, especially in the fine arts. At the Kunstgewerbeschule it was possible for them to study there since it opened in 1867, however women were relegated to the role of decorators, at the beginning primarily studying in the textile department. The aforementioned course taught by Franz Čižek was actually a course for the composition and execution of „ornaments“ in different media, which meant that students were expected to learn how to paint decorations from an ornamental perspective in order to apply them to objects of applied arts. Čižek in his course, as he pursued an interest in finding new forms of “authentic” expression through ornaments, however shifted his focus to different strands contemporary visual arts and dance as models – thereby (accidentally) offering specifically to women students new models of artistic subjectivity and praxis.

The final question I have prepared concerns the challenges of transitioning artistic forms with an artist to a new country with different environments, customs, and tastes.

Eva: Unfortunately, we have not conducted research specifically on this topic yet. What we are currently focusing on is the migration of forms from so-called folk art into modernist Viennese artworks. These forms and aspects originated from rural regions or economic „peripheries“ of the former monarchy Austria-Hungary. At the turn of the 20^th  century, especially textiles from such areas were bought by artists ( Emilie Flöge, Gustav Klimt for example) and cultural theorists (such as Michael Haberlandt or Alois Riegl) who lived and worked in „centres“ like Vienna, Budapest or Prague. While within the nascent fields of ethnology and art history attempts to document how these non-industrialized art practices (often referred to as „primitive“ or „original“) were made, modernist artists appropriated patterns and designs within their own creations. Even though the artworks served as models and their formal language was copied, there is no documentation of the individual artists that created them, or they‘re subsumed within their regional group and therefore remain anonymous, which indicates a colonial gaze with which those interested in so-called folk art acted. Among them was Rosalia Rothansl, head of the textile workshop at the Kunstgewerbeschule, who trained many of those women artists who later became part of the Wiener Werkstätte. She used her extensive collection of artworks from regions that are now part of Croatia, Slovenia, Slovakia, Romania, Ukraine or Hungary as teaching aids.

Stefanie: These products were not considered as art, but rather used like „ethnographic“ objects (not by chance this interest coincides with the emergence of ethnography and art history as academic disciplines), or, as Eva already said, from a „primitivist“ perspective, as anonymous patterns for modern crafts, which themselves would have formed a counterpart to cheap mass production.