Early 20th Viennese Secessionist Movement Carpet

Austria

18’8 x 21’6”

570 x 655

CIrca 1925

Wool pile of symmetric knots on a wool and cotton foundation

After World War I the Austro-Hungarian Empire was broken up and regional decorative styles emerged from the pieces. Vienna, once the capital of a vast multicultural empire,

was reduced to an elegant, but basically historic, secondary city. 

Art Nouveau, originally a French innovation, rapidly spread to other fashionable locales.

There is earlier floral Art Deco and later, geometric Art Deco, and this particularly large piece is clearly in the latter direction although it seems to date somewhat earlier.

The carpet continues the non-historistic, non-copying of contemporaneous styles, which was one of the Secession period’s ideals. It is geometric Deco before it became a fashion

trend in the 1930’s. The pattern is created by rows and columns of identical, small square mosaic elements. The field is a raspberry- rose pink. The main border shows two distinct, concentric double rows of small squares.

The enclosed, floating “field” pattern presents three concentric, diminishing rectangles of double rows of similar squares. At the center is a vertical, floating, identically posed column of three adjoint runs of chessboard squares.

The borders and other decorated sections are tied into the ground by small, square raspberry-rose intrusions. As a result, the borders and stripes are embedded in rather than set on the ground. The basically tone-on-tone color scheme eliminates the vertiginous character of concentrically diminishing, falling rectangles which would certainly be more pronounced in a more richly colored piece. One does not want one’s furnishings toppling into a hole in the middle of the living room! Some Art Deco pieces are expansive in their patterns. This is not one of them.  Nothing pushes out, or pulls in. 

What could be simpler than lines of squares, with a general tricolored soft palette?

 Unlike contemporaneous French carpets whose designers are often known, this piece is anonymous. The knots are fairly large. The large size may indicate originally an institutional destination, such as a hotel, rather than a private buyer. This carpet shows no influence of the contemporaneous Bauhaus designers.

The condition is particularly good. And the plain, lightly colored outermost surround is uniformly intact.