Bacchante, 1919

Born in Vienna, the artist Valerie Wieselthier (1895–1945), known as Vally, was a favorite student of Josef Hofmann’s (1870–1956) and Koloman Moser’s (1868–1918). She trained from 1917 under Michael Powolny (1871–1954) and Dagobert Peche (1887–1923) at the ceramics department of the Wiener Werkstätte. From 1914 to 1920 she attended the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts for Women, the present-day University of Applied Arts. From the age of 17 she insisted that she would become an artist and would never have to marry. Her expressive ceramic heads can be seen as a response of a new generation of women artists, among them Gudrun Baudisch (1907–1982), Susi Singer (1895–1955) and Dina Kuhn (1891–1963), who confidently demanded their rights and their place in society. The 1919 Bacchante is wearing her hair in a bob, like Wieselthier herself, has flowers in her hair and is made up. The artist’s love for detail and ornamentation is unmistakable. In 1928, she exhibited several of her ceramic works at the International Exhibition of Ceramic Art at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. In 1945 Wieselthier died from colon cancer at the age of 50 in New York.

EF, 2021