Female dancer, c. 1930

Around 1920, the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts became the venue of a singular modernist experiment. Franz Čižek’s (1865–1946) class for “Ornamental Morphology” gave birth to Kineticism, a discipline in which movement is regarded as the quintessence of any type of creative expression. Reverberating in the paintings by Erika Giovanna Klien (1900–1957) and her colleagues at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts was the time-honored potential of ornaments to stretch out indefinitely. The key word was growth. Viennese Kineticism – much like Italian Futurism, with which it shares striking commonalities – broke the mold with optical rather than haptic elements.

IR, 2021