by Tim Bonyhady
Moriz and Hermine probably were intent on having a Hoffmann apartment but gave precedence to buying their first real estate. Just as Adolf and Ida began by acquiring a villa that they could use to escape Vienna’s summer heat, so did Moriz and Hermine. After investigating the Austrian and Czech countryside on their annual holidays, they decided on Alt Aussee, a fashionable resort in the lake district near Salzburg known as the Salzkammergut. As the Austrian economy boomed in 1909, they paid 40,000 crowns, or $400,000, for a fully furnished fourteen-room, three-story villa with an attic, a basement, and extensive grounds including a tennis court. While most houses in Austria were owned by men, Moriz and Hermine bought theirs together—an arrangement that probably had financial advantages but also was decidedly modern.
A car was another priority. By 1911, there were well over three thousand on Vienna’s streets, and most of the families against whom Moriz and Hermine measured themselves owned one. They chose a Gräf & Stift, the most prestigious, luxurious Austrian make, preferred by the emperor and the archdukes Franz Ferdinand and Karl Stefan. The car bought by Moriz and Hermine was so big that it could easily carry all six of the Gallias, the twins’ governess, and an abundance of luggage. As soon as their new chauffeur arrived with it that summer at the Villa Gallia, they began using it like the proverbial boy with a new bicycle, taking it out at least once or twice every day for what Hermine soon described as the “obligatory car ride.”
The villa in Alt Aussee, bought in 1909 by Moriz and Hermine as a summerhouse. (Illustration Credits ill.23)
Meanwhile Hermine demonstrated her attachment to Hoffmann by acquiring only his silver for the family’s apartment in the Schleifmühlgasse. Most of the boxes, bottle tops, serviette rings, and coasters that she selected were for the dining room along with a basket for fresh fruit and a table centerpiece for preserved fruit. Other baskets and vases adorned the salon. The only commission was the cigarette box inscribed with Hermine’s initials. But a pair of ribbed vases on bell-shaped feet designed by Hoffmann in 1911 were all the Werkstätte made in this form. An inkstand for Moriz’s desk was most spectacular. Like many of Hoffmann’s best pieces of tableware, it looked more like the model for a fantastical building than a functional object.
Moriz and Hermine bought Wohllebengasse 4 at the end of 1911 when Austria’s economy was still booming—mounting inflation and growing liquidity problems notwithstanding. Although just a few minutes’ walk from the Schleifmühlgasse, the Wohllebengasse was in a classier part of the Fourth District, where there were much grander apartment blocks, palais, and embassies, and almost no shops. While the Fourth District had one of the smallest Jewish populations of any part of the city, Vienna’s wealthiest Jews lived there. The Rothschilds’ palais was around the corner in the Prinz-Eugen-Strasse. The Wittgensteins lived around the other corner in the Argentinierstrasse.
Just as Moriz and Hermine bought their villa in Alt Aussee together, so they acquired their block in the Wohllebengasse. It came with a substantial three-story house erected seventy-five years before but was slated for redevelopment as part of the larger reconstruction of the Wohllebengasse that started in the 1880s and saw the Wittgensteins erect the street’s largest apartment building on a double block. By January 1912, Moriz and Hermine were talking to architects. By May they had the approval of Vienna’s municipal authorities for a five-story structure with an attic above and a cellar below.
The house in the Wohllebengasse was the most significant manifestation of the wealth of Moriz and Hermine, a mark of how rich they had grown in twenty years in the Austrian capital. It was the sharpest expression of their social aspirations, their ambition to live in one of the most exclusive parts of Vienna, and their desire to entertain in the most lavish, luxurious style. It became vital to their finances, a vast source of income, because they rented out the front of the ground floor as offices and the top three floors as apartments. It was the greatest demonstration of their taste for the best in modern Viennese design.
Moriz and Hermine kept the most prestigious part of the building—its Nobelstock, the “noble floor,” or first floor—for themselves. They also occupied the back part of the floor below, so their apartment was unusually big, totaling over seventy-five hundred square feet. Yet the apartments on the top three floors were also vast: rather than divide these floors into several small apartments, as was common in older buildings, Moriz and Hermine devoted each one to a single apartment. In doing so, they ensured that only the rich could be their tenants.
Moriz and Hermine also built two garages, as they became one of the first two-car families in Vienna when even one was a mark of modernity and wealth. Whereas they rewarded Gretl when she finished school in 1912 by giving her a diamond and pearl pendant and taking her to Bayreuth, they gave Erni his own car when he matriculated in 1913. It was made by the Turin firm, Itala, which secured an international market after one of its vehicles won the first transnational car rally, the 1907 Great Race from Beijing to Paris. While much smaller than the family’s Gräf & Stift, the Itala also had great cachet.
The ground-floor entrance to Wohllebengasse 4, designed by Franz von Krauss. (Illustration Credits ill.24)
Because Hoffmann never designed apartment buildings, another architect had to design the house. Moriz and Hermine chose Franz von Krauss, whose commissions included Vienna’s Jubiläumstheater and Hofburgtheater. As the British magazine The Studio recognized, Krauss’s most successful designs included “modern houses built straight to defy time and weather” that were free of “superfluous decoration, culled from all lands and all periods.” These houses often made unusually good provision for servants, prompted by the difficulty of securing good domestic staff at the start of the century. One of Krauss’s villas included a servants’ balcony that they could enjoy “unseen and unheard.”
Krauss’s design for Moriz and Hermine was similar. The entrance to the building was especially lavish and elegant, combining fluted white columns, a black marble fountain, and gray marble wall cladding, with gold and white tiles around its cornice. The facade of the house was plain except for neoclassical touches. Four sets of French doors identified the Nobelstock where the family had their entertaining rooms, bedrooms, and bathrooms. The kitchen and pantry were below, along with the bedrooms of the female servants, which had their own windows rather than just a light well, as was usually the case. The Gallias’ servants also had their own bathroom when it was conventional for all the servants of a building to share one in the attic.
The immediate context of Krauss’s building made it all the more striking. When Moriz and Hermine commissioned it, the other houses on the Wohllebengasse were historicist. The same was true on the next street, the Schwindgasse. The embrace of the modern by Moriz and Hermine was a public assertion of difference, a clear rejection of everything surrounding them. An immediate vindication of their taste came when the City of Vienna awarded a prize to Krauss because of the building’s clear articulation and restrained, elegant decoration. When Krauss published a book of his work, he included three photographs of the building.
Hoffmann’s commission was five rooms—a salon for formal entertaining, a smoking room for Moriz, a boudoir for Hermine, a dining room for formal meals, and a hall for less formal ones. But Hoffmann typically designed almost everything in them as part of creating a Gesamtkunstwerk. While his insistence on doing so was no problem for a newly married couple such as Guido and Nelly Hamburger, who otherwise owned little or no furniture, it was an issue for a long-married couple such as Moriz and Hermine, who had furnished their apartment in the Schleifmühlgasse at considerable expense. As Moriz and Hermine planned their apartment, they had to decide whether to jettison or retain their old things. While Moriz and Hermine wanted an apartment that was strikingly new, they did not want to waste what they had acquired, and so they moved their best Biedermeier into the smaller of their two salons in the Wohllebengasse. In doing so, they created an awkward juxtaposition with the five other front rooms, w
here Hoffmann was responsible for all the furniture and fittings except the family’s Steinway grand piano, and everything he designed apart from one of the carpets and some of the wallpapers was unique.
The opulence of Hoffmann’s work for Moriz and Hermine was in marked contrast to his work for Guido and Nelly. The hall in the Wohllebengasse was hung with floral fabric and contained ebonized furniture with red morocco upholstery. The salon was painted yellow and contained fruitwood furniture covered with black-and-white upholstery. The boudoir was hung with blue silk embellished with red-and-green rose sprays and contained white-and-gold furniture, again upholstered red. The smoking room was painted white above a thick wooden frieze hung with a floral fabric below and contained ebonized furniture upholstered with green wool. The dining room combined white walls with a black marble wall fountain, black marble buffet, black marble dado, black marble architraves, and walnut furniture. Each room had a different carpet—placed on the best parquetry floor in the hall, salon, and dining room but wall to wall in the boudoir and smoking room.
The family’s pictures were vital to this schema. The director of Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, Gustav Glück, spoke for many of Klimt’s patrons when he declared that Klimt’s paintings demanded a “special kind of environment” and that Hoffmann was the architect who made them look “most effective.” But Hoffmann failed to do so in the Wohllebengasse, where his installation of the paintings was no match for Koloman Moser’s design of the Klimt Kollektiv at the Secession a decade before. While Hoffmann squeezed the beech forest landscape into the salon above a marble-framed, grille-fronted central heating unit, he hung Hermine’s portrait in her boudoir next to Andri’s portrait of Moriz, an obvious—but unsuccessful—pairing because the portraits were so different.
The boudoir in the Gallia apartment. The Klimt portrait of Hermine is visible on the left wall. The Koloman Moser sweet bowl that Theobald Pollak gave Hermine in 1903 is on the table in the middle of the room. (Illustration Credits ill.25)
The start of a “trade crisis” did not dint the Gallias’ spending. Instead, Hermine acquired ever more objects, including her most striking piece of glass—a red-and-white bowl by Hoffmann’s student, Carl Witzmann—and three new jardinieres by Hoffmann himself, which would become a set with the two bell-shaped vases from 1911, creating Hermine’s most spectacular display of silver at the end of her new dining room. Moriz’s one concern, when he sent a letter from Vienna to Hermine in Alt Aussee that August, was the gulf between the original quotations for the apartment and the bill he received from Jakob Soulek, who made much of Hoffmann’s furniture. Moriz, who was bald, exclaimed that his hair stood on end when he first saw Soulek’s invoice. Moriz was sure that, if he did not challenge it after scrutinizing Soulek’s original quotes, he would pay double what he had anticipated.
The smoking room in the Gallia apartment. The Andri portrait of the four Gallia children is on the right wall. Moriz’s silver Upmann cigar box made by Klinkosch is on the table in the foreground, while Moriz’s silver Hoffmann inkstand is on his desk behind. (Illustration Credits ill.26)
These rooms put Moriz and Hermine where they wanted to be—at the forefront of fashion. Like Hoffmann’s other major commissions in this period, the Gallia apartment excited immediate interest in fashionable design circles in Austria and Germany. As the furniture was being built, Austria’s leading interior design magazine, Das Interieur, published six of Hoffmann’s drawings for the rooms. When they were complete, the German magazines Innen-Dekoration and Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration published photographs of them, as well as one of the new Hoffmann jardinieres. The most important contemporary book about Viennese design, Max Eisler’s Österreichische Werkkultur, included two of the interiors, the jardiniere, the white-and-gold bureau from Hermine’s boudoir, and the Witzmann glass.
The photographs of the interiors by Bruno Reiffenstein, one of Vienna’s foremost architectural photographers, were a crucial means of promoting Hoffmann’s work. Everything about them was carefully staged, from the placement of the furniture to the selection of objects on the tabletops. They showed an environment in which almost everything was Wiener Werkstätte, including the silverware that Hermine had been acquiring for a decade. While the Moser sweet bowl that Theobald Pollak gave Hermine in 1903 was on a table in her boudoir, a Hoffmann fruit stand from 1907 was on the buffet in the dining room and the Hoffmann inkstand from 1909 was on the desk in Moriz’s smoking room.
The box on the circular table in the smoking room was an exception. This box was a piece of trompe l’oeil—a silver replica of a wooden cigar box of the Upmann company, which produced some of the finest Havana cigars from the mid-nineteenth century. This box not only had the Upmann name on the center of the lid but was embellished with two rows of paper tobacco tax stamps bearing the Cyrillic script for “Imported Tobacco,” as if the box had been brought into Russia. Such boxes, which were fashionable under the Romanovs from the late 1870s, were generally made in Moscow, though soon found a wider market. Moriz’s box was unusually large, heavy, and superbly engraved. Despite its Russian facade, it was made by the Viennese silversmith J. C. Klinkosch, who had designed the family’s first set of silver cutlery. The inclusion of this box in the photograph suggests that she and Moriz regarded it as particularly valuable and stylish.
The main piece of ceramics in the salon was different again. It was Nordpolen, or North Pole, a table centerpiece depicting two polar bears around a frozen pool, made by Royal Copenhagen, which, after an extended period of stagnation, had a renaissance in the mid-1880s. As the company secured an international market, its prices soared, prompting one commentator to describe them as “simply amusing in their exorbitance.” The piece displayed by Hermine and Moriz was one of Royal Copenhagen’s most acclaimed crystalline works, using white and sea-green glazes. Designed in 1900 by Carl Bonnesen, it was reproduced in 1905 by the art nouveau magazine Der Moderne Stil and shaped the work of the Japanese potter Makuzu K¯ozan, who was particularly open to the latest European fashions.
There was much more on show beyond the lens of Reiffenstein’s camera. While Nelly Hamburger had a small collection of Hoffmann silver that she distributed around her Hoffmann rooms, she filled the vitrine in her salon with Royal Copenhagen vases and figurines, which she soon supplemented with antique clocks and Czech crystal glasses. Hermine was similarly eclectic. She filled the main vitrine in her boudoir almost entirely with Royal Copenhagen. She placed a group of Meissen figurines and vases and an array of Biedermeier silver and glass in the floor-to-ceiling cabinets that separated the salon from the hall.
A story handed down over the generations provides a measure of both the opulence of this environment and how it was perceived by visitors. One day a family friend arrived carrying a walking stick, which he had never done while the Gallias lived above the gaslight showroom in the Schleifmühlgasse. The Gallias were concerned. They wanted to know how their visitor had injured himself. “Why are you carrying the stick?” they asked. “Because there is so much marble here,” he responded. “I brought the stick in case I needed to touch wood.”
The political situation was deteriorating all the while. It is now a cliché that the Hapsburg Empire was close to collapse in the early twentieth century, set to fracture as the myriad national groups within it secured independence. For all of Vienna’s wealth, vitality, and creativity, it was a capital living on borrowed time, making it no place to invest, especially with the lavishness of the Gallias’ Hoffmann rooms. Yet for all the vulnerability of the empire, its fate was far from self-evident in 1913, even to close observers such as Henry Wickham Steed of the London Times. After ten years in Vienna, Steed could see no reason “why, with moderate foresight on the part of the Dynasty, the Hapsburg Monarchy should not retain its rightful place in the European community.” While Steed recognized that the empire faced internal crises, he argued that they were “crises of growth rather than of decay.”
The salon in the Gallia apartm
ent. Klimt’s Beech Forest is visible on the left wall. Nordpolen, the Gallias’ most spectacular piece of Royal Copenhagen, is on the table nearby. (Illustration Credits ill.27)
Moriz still manifested this confidence early in 1914, when the Wiener Werkstätte almost collapsed despite Fritz Waerndorfer’s spending most of his fortune on sustaining it. While a number of artists and designers, led by Hoffmann, contributed to its refinancing, most of its new funds came from Hoffmann’s patrons, including Moriz, who became the vice-chairman of its board after investing 20,000 crowns (or about $150,000 in today’s money). As this process saw Waerndorfer ousted from the Werkstätte, he lambasted its new shareholders, claiming that these “new money people” immediately resorted to “sharp practices” in order to make “plenty of money” from the Werkstätte. But while Moriz expected to manage the workshops better than Waerndorfer, who was a typical example of second-generation wealth, more adept at spending money than accumulating it, money making was not Moriz’s goal. Like Hoffmann’s other patrons who became shareholders in the Werkstätte, he saw himself as a philanthropist ensuring the survival of one of Vienna’s finest artistic institutions when its record suggested it would always run at a loss. His goal was to sustain creativity, not profit from it.