17 July 2026 — 15 November 2026

Modernity and Opulence: Women of the Wiener Werkstätte

Modernity and Opulence: Women of the Wiener Werkstätte sheds new light on the role Jewish women played as artists, designers, patrons, and tastemakers in shaping modernist aesthetics in early twentieth-century Vienna and beyond. With more than two hundred objects by some thirty Jewish women artists, the exhibition is organized by theme to reveal the extraordinary range and technical mastery of the women of the Wiener Werkstätte across mediums. Particular emphasis falls on Vally Wieselthier and Felice Rix-Ueno, whose prolific work in ceramics and textile design, respectively, has had a lasting influence on both disciplines. The exhibition also offers a meaningful reintroduction to artists whose work is less well known today, and a platform for exploring their impact within the histories of art and design. Active from 1903 to 1932, the Wiener Werkstätte was founded by the architect Josef Hoffmann, the artist Koloman Moser, and the industrialist and art collector Fritz Waerndorfer as a multidisciplinary collective and commercial enterprise devoted to the synthesis of art and life—the Gesamtkunstwerk—as an essential condition of modern living. The founding of the Werkstätte, which designed, produced, and sold goods of the highest quality, coincided with, and was mutually reinforced by, the growing economic opportunities open to women in Vienna at the time. Drawing on recent scholarship, the exhibition shows that roughly a quarter of the nearly two hundred women artists known to have worked for the Wiener Werkstätte were of Jewish faith or descent or came from Jewish families. It is the first in-depth presentation of the Jewish women—artists and patrons alike—who helped shape the defining modernist ideas and aesthetics of the Wiener Werkstätte. The exhibition is a collaboration between the Jewish Museum, New York, and the MAK – Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna. It is curated by Kristina Parsons, Leon Levy Associate Curator at the Jewish Museum, with curatorial consultancy by Anne-Katrin Rossberg of the MAK.

The Jewish Museum