Rudolf Kalvach’s Wiener Werkstätte Postcards (1907)

The Wiener Werkstätte, or Vienna Workshop, brought together artists of the Vienna Secession in the pursuit of the Gesamtkunstwerk: that is, the mission to aestheticize every corner of daily life and transform it into a “total work of art”. In their effort to beautify quotidian objects, the line between fine art and craft was assiduously blurred: the collaboration churned out avant-garde furniture, geometric serving sets, and patterned textiles. Prominent architects devised tea sets and visiting card trays; designers crafted children’s toys. Ephemera and graphic arts were brought into the fold too, and a stunning range of artists contributed to the Werkstätte’s graphic illustrated postcard series, from renowned painters like Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka to prolific satirists like Moriz Jung. All together, nearly one thousand postcard designs would emerge from the Werkstätte’s own publishing firm between 1907 and the start of World War I. The same care that the collaboration lavished on its luxury metalwork was poured into these small runs of high-end lithography, woodcut, and pochoir prints — tiny artworks that were more affordable, but no less collectible, than the other Werkstätte products.

Among the first wave of artists hired for the series’ launch was the young artist Rudolf Kalvach (1883–1932). Kalvach, a graphic designer trained in Vienna and active in Trieste, would design a total of twenty-one postcards for the Werkstätte before being institutionalized, in 1912, for catatonic schizophrenia: the disease that would eventually end his career. His range of subjects reflects the variety of audiences and occasions catered to by the Werkstätte’s press. Some work as traditional greeting cards: like a pair of folksy “happy birthday” and “happy name day” notes featuring ecstatic, flower-laden ladies and gentlemen. Most, however, make a mockery of the greeting card’s sentimentality. All are instantly recognizable as Kalvach’s work. With a strong palette of primary colors on black backgrounds and contorted, long-legged monsters, Kalvach’s cards satirize everything from marriage to the latest in modern dance.

“Inspiration”, under Kalvach’s hand, is a bird tormenting a slouched youth like a bad dream. Similarly beset are the “lute player” (who ducks the crooked tail of the demon riding his shoulder) and the grimacing figure of “self help”, who spears a snake wrapped around his neck. “Idyll” is a fat man fanned by a friendly, fanged gargoyle. Kalvach makes light of classical myths and social ones: from a cartoonish, scantily clad lady standing as the figurehead of “the victorious” (die siegreichen) to a grasping, double-chinned “Leda and the swan”. But what Kalvach seems most eager to skewer is family life. “Blessings” (Segen, referencing the traditional “kindersegen” or blessing of children) sees a mother bent double by her gaggle of screaming, gap-toothed children. “Harmony” is a couple dissolving, hideously, into an unhappy agglomerate. Mutterglück, or the “joys of motherhood”, is the only happy family to be seen: and it’s not a traditional one.

Kalvach’s graphic vocabulary — the heavy, woodcut lines and bright colors — would have an outsized influence on Austrian art, especially considering his brief career. Kokoschka’s early works, for example, seem to refer to Kalvach’s own: an artefact, no doubt, of his practice of copying Kalvach’s drawings as he developed his own style. The appreciation must have been mutual: in June of 1907, Kalvach sent one of Kokoschka’s designs to his future wife.

Though they bring to mind medieval grotesques and brightly colored folk art, Kalvach’s creatures also feel distinctly modern. But aside from the more easygoing “congratulations” cards, it is hard to picture the right occasion for most of Kalvach’s work. This, as it turns out, was the case for most of the Werkstätte’s series. As the collector Leonard A. Lauder attests (former Esteé Lauder CEO and the most important collector of Weiner Werkstätte postcards), about 95% of the cards Lauder saw had never been written on. Apart from each year’s holiday cards, most postcards were immediately collector’s objects. Kalvach’s cards, by virtue of being less in demand at the moment, are all the more collectible today for having seen just a single print run. Not one surviving copy of Mutterglück was actually mailed.

The Wiener Werkstätte shuttered in 1932, after a long run of relying on wealthy benefactors to keep the aesthetically indulgent but chronically insolvent project afloat. The sideways success of its postcards — coveted, collected, but almost never posted — reflected the challenge of the Werkstätte’s idealism. Even the postcard series, the most accessible of the Gesamtkunstwerk project (conceived, one critic points out, just as the Werkstätte’s financial difficulties began and at the height of the “golden age of postcards”) couldn’t widen the Werkstätte’s market enough to support the luxury goods to which its designers were devoted: the light fixtures, the couture. But while it lasted, there was nowhere better for Kalvach’s cheerful, uncompromising grotesques to see the light.

See a selection of Kalvach’s postcards in the gallery below, two of which we’ve adapted into a T-shirt and a print.