Wiener Werkstätte Arts and Crafts. Draft for a catalogue cover, c. 1920

Hilda Jesser (1894–1985) studied from 1912 under Maximilian Kurzweil (1867–1916) at the Art School for Women and Girls in Vienna, before training at the School of Arts and Crafts from 1914. Her teachers included the architect Josef Hoffmann (1870–1956) and the sculptor Anton Hanak (1875–1934), among others. From 1916 Jesser worked for the Wiener Werkstätte, designing fabric patterns, embroidery, cushion decors, wallpapers, items of jewelry, leatherwork, ceramics for everyday use, posters as well as six fashion postcards. She further carried out commissions for the companies Lobmeyr and Augarten. Her Draft for a catalogue cover, created around 1920, shows her pursuit of formal simplicity and her concentration on individual pictorial elements. The lettering and the motif are on a par, each taking up half of the image area. The omission of a shadow underscores the depiction’s planar-decorative aspect. Hilda Jesser died in 1985 at the age of 91 in Vienna.

EF, 2021