box

This set of six wineglasses was purchased in its original, ruched satin and leather presentation box, and it represents Otto Prutscher’s best-known design in glass. The series was created for the Viennese luxury retailer E. Bakalowits Söhne, and the glass was made by the Bohemian glassworks Meyr’s Neffe. The form and decoration reflect the artistic preferences of two important avantgarde groups in Vienna in the early 20th century: the Vienna Secession and the Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshops). The Vienna Secession was formed in 1897 when a group of forward-thinking artists came together to oppose the tooconservative society of artists in Vienna. The Secession artists, who included the painter Gustav Klimt, the architect and designer Josef Hoffmann, and the painter and designer Kolomon Moser, wished to promote the arts and crafts and to bring more abstract and simple forms to the designs of buildings, interiors, and the decorative and graphic arts. Otto Prutscher, who studied with Hoffmann, designed in many materials, including ceramics, wood, textiles, and silver. In 1903, Hoffmann and Moser formed the cooperative known as the Wiener Werkstätte. The Werkstätte’s aim was to reform the applied arts with objects of exceptional design and quality, and Prutscher was one of a handful of the cooperative’s innovative designers. Similar goblets appear in Torsten Bröhan and Martin P. Eidelberg, Glass of the Avant-Garde: From Vienna Secession to Bauhaus: The Torsten Bröhan Collection from the Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas, Madrid, Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2001, pp. 38–39.