War Glass, 1915

With the outbreak of World War I, the Wiener Werkstätte and its associated production facilities faced personnel shortages and sales problems. Among their compensation efforts was the production of war glasses, which proved especially successful as the ministry of public works requested in 1915 that artists “express the patriotic purpose” in their works; in February of that year, an exhibition of “war memorabilia” had been held at the Austrian Museum of Art and Industry. In the case of plain, cylindrical drinking glasses, the decoration consisted of linear enamel colors, often representing the colors of the flags of the allied Central Powers. In the present example, the decoration is an all-round sequence of rhombi in the Hungarian colors of red-white-green, the Austrian colors of black-yellow as well as the black-white-red colors of the German Empire. The alternating small and large rhombi invest the design with a dynamic effect.

IR, 2021