Jugendstil Women and the Making of Modern Design

Discussing many actors not widely known outside specialist circles, Sabine Wieber demonstrates the important roles women played not only in questions of design and creative practice, but also in social and political reforms, feminism, and education...The structure of the book is well-conceived to consider the broader categories beyond artist or designer, allowing Wieber to weave a narrative around complex social and political questions without falling into tropes of design icons or individual hagiographies. -- Journal of Design History This book goes beyond an exercise in writing forgotten women back into the history of the Jugendstil movement. Sabine Wieber explores the complex reality of women's design practice, education, patronage and taste-making and embeds in the realities of economic survival, inter-personal relationships, legal frameworks and the persistence of gendered thinking that circumscribed their lives and implacably erased their contributions from the historical record. -- Charlotte Ashby, Associate Lecturer in Art and Design History at Birkbeck, University of London, UK Lucidly written and packed with groundbreaking archival research, Jugendstil Women and the Making of Modern Design is a revolutionary investigation of a foundational but often misunderstood modernist movement. Sabine Wieber restores a range of essential yet largely forgotten female figures to a breathtakingly new history of Jugendstil art, craft, interior design, and fashion as well as its diverse manifestations in pedagogy, patronage and activism. -- Elizabeth Otto, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, The University at Buffalo, State University of New York, USA In this groundbreaking book, Sabine Wieber offers a much-needed corrective to male-centered narratives of Jugendstil. In detailed case studies that elaborate women's contributions as designers, makers, teachers, patrons, activists and salonnieres to a distinctly German variant of Art Nouveau, she both illuminates the important and very diverse roles that women played in the inception of this modern style and demonstrates the varied ways in which they used it to secure a place of increased personal, socio-economic and political power in the late German Empire. Historically and geographically specific to turn-of-the-century Munich, Jugendstil Women and the Making of Modern Design is a must-read revisionist history of modernism that does not simply supplement the narrative with women but questions the underlying structures of its historiography. -- Maria Makela, Professor Emerita of Visual Studies, California College of the Arts, USA