Rudolf Kalvach’s Wiener Werkstätte Postcards (1907)

The Wiener Werkstätte, or Vienna Workshop, brought together artists of the Vienna Secession in the pursuit of the _Gesamtkunstwerk_: that is, the mission to aestheticize every corner of daily life and transform it into a “total work of art”. In their effort to beautify quotidian objects, the line between fine art and craft was assiduously blurred: the collaboration churned out avant-garde furniture, geometric serving sets, and patterned textiles. Prominent architects devised tea sets and visiting card trays; designers crafted children’s toys.

Ephemera and graphic arts were brought into the fold too, and a stunning range of artists contributed to the Werkstätte’s graphic illustrated postcard series, from renowned painters like Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka to prolific satirists like Moriz Jung. All together, nearly one thousand postcard designs would emerge from the Werkstätte’s own publishing firm between 1907 and the start of World War I. The same care that the collaboration lavished on its luxury metalwork was poured into these small runs of high-end lithography, woodcut, and _pochoir_ prints — tiny artworks that were more affordable, but no less collectible, than the other Werkstätte products.

Among the first wave of artists hired for the series’ launch was the young artist Rudolf Kalvach (1883–1932). Kalvach, a graphic designer trained in Vienna and active in Trieste, would design a total of twenty-one postcards for the Werkstätte before being institutionalized, in 1912, for catatonic schizophrenia: the disease that would eventually end his career. His range of subjects reflects the variety of audiences and occasions catered to by the Werkstätte’s press.

Some work as traditional greeting cards: like a pair of folksy “happy birthday” and “happy name day” notes featuring ecstatic, flower-laden ladies and gentlemen. Most, however, make a mockery of the greeting card’s sentimentality. All are instantly recognizable as Kalvach’s work.

With a strong palette of primary colors on black backgrounds and contorted, long-legged monsters, Kalvach’s cards satirize everything from marriage to the latest in modern dance. Similarly beset are the “lute player” (who ducks the crooked tail of the demon riding his shoulder) and the grimacing figure of “self help”, who spears a snake wrapped around his neck. Kalvach makes light of classical myths and social ones: from a cartoonish, scantily clad lady standing as the figurehead of “the victorious” (_die siegreichen_) to a grasping, double-chinned “Leda and the swan”.

But what Kalvach seems most eager to skewer is family life. Kalvach’s graphic vocabulary — the heavy, woodcut lines and bright colors — would have an outsized influence on Austrian art, especially considering his brief career. Kokoschka’s early works, for example, seem to refer to Kalvach’s own: an artefact, no doubt, of his practice of copying Kalvach’s drawings as he developed his own style.