Josef Hoffmann: Between Industry and Craft 
Probably around 1910 the J. & J. Kohn Com 
pany produced a decorative looking bentwood 
chair by Josef Hoffmann which in some way 
already seemed to anticipate the design vo- 
cabulary of Art Deco. 1 The model, with its ex- 
pressively curved and delicate backrest, was 
made for the winter exhibition of the Austrian 
Museum of Art and Industry, but was not in- 
cluded in Kohn's catalogs. Presumably, the 
elaborate design, in which the rear legs make 
a transition from a square to a circular cross- 
section partway up the backrest, appeared to 
be unsuitable for mass production at that time. 
This applies all the more to the chair with the 
opulently carved backrest in curved forms, 
which Hoffmann presented more than twenty 
years later at the exhibition Das befreite 
Handwerk [The Liberated Craft]. The exhibition 
which took place in 1934, also in the Austrian 
Museum of Art and Industry, was a very explic- 
itly formulated “challenge to the ever dimin- 
ished pure form of the merely objective” 2 and 
wanted to undertake a national-conservative 
attempt to liberate the domestic handicrafts, 
which were being threatened by “economic 
subsistence” 3 through competition from me- 
chanical production. 
1 Cf. Vera J. Behal, Möbel des Jugendstils, Munich 1981, 140f. 
2 Richard Ernst, „Zum Ausstellungsprogramm“, in: Exhib. Cat. Vienna 
1934: Das befreite Handwerk, 13. 
3 Oswald Hertl [=Haerdtl]: Foreword, in: ibid., 5-7: 6. 
Sessel für die Ausstellung Chair for the exhibition „Das befreite Handwerk“, Wien Vienna 1934 
Entwurf Design: Josef Hoffmann, Wien Vienna, 1934 
Ausführung Execution: Johann Soulek, Wien Vienna, 1934; Nuss, massiv, geschnitzt, Leder, 
gepolstert Walnut, solid, carved, leather, upholstered; MAK H 1701/1934 
195