The cover of the book delivers what it promises: the daring colour gradient from turquoise to blue, bright green, yellow, red, pink and dark blue does not date back to the era of disco and funk. Dagobert Peche designed the silk fabric called ‘Rainbow’ in 1919 and his work has inspired many designers to this day.
Text: Isabella Marboe
Dagobert Peche, Möbel aus der Wohnung Wolko Gartenberg in Paris, 1913, Birnbaumholz, schwarz gebeizt; Lindenholz, geschnitzt und vergoldet, Wolfgang Bauer, bel etage, © MAK/Christian Mendez
Eccentric designer
Dagobert Peche was probably the most eccentric designer of the Wiener Werkstätte and one of the most unconventional artists of his generation. He was a master of the surface, and some of his fabric patterns confidently anticipate flower power. The colourfulness of his wallpapers is stunning, but the thorns of the black fabric ‘Maze’ point to the darker realms of sadomasochism, gothic and punk rock. The spring-summer collection designed by Andreas Kronthaler for Vivienne Westwood utilises precisely this fabric. With Peche, horror lurks around every corner, his light, airy floral patterns make the soul fly, his work is thoroughly ambivalent. The exhibition at Vienna's Museum of Applied Arts MAK opens the door to his unusual artistic universe. The Wiener Werkstätte is not generally associated with an excessively exuberant wealth of colour and form, just as the design of fabrics and wallpaper is not thought to be creatively explosive. Dagobert Peche managed both effortlessly.
Dagobert Peche, Entwurf für die Wiener-Werkstätte-Tapete Pfeil, 1921, Bleistift, Gouache auf Papier, © MAK
Creativity
‘Peche Pop - Dagobert Peche and his traces in the present’ is the title of the catalogue accompanying the exhibition of the same name at Vienna's Museum of Applied Arts (MAK), which reveals an artistic cosmos. Peche was one of the most extravagant, eccentric designers of Viennese Modernism, and a stroll through his work is like walking through a labyrinthine kaleidoscope in which everything is refracted many times over. From silk fabric and wallpaper to a bunch of paper flowers: there was no object, no matter how banal, that he could not turn into an extraordinary object. Even a Christmas tree decoration becomes a flash of lightning, which could also have inspired ‘High Sierra’ by Robert Smithson.
Dagobert Peche, Salonschrank, 1913, Ausführung: Jakob Soulek, Birnbaumholz, schwarz gebeizt; Lindenholz, geschnitzt, vergoldet, © MAK
Objects with a life of their own
Peche was a master of the surface. He was particularly fond of the stylistic device of ombré, a colour gradient from light to dark, which can be used to create the impression of a curve on a surface. He loved the disguise and alienation, the ornament and the puzzle game between the second and third dimension. In his hands, a porcelain sweet tin became a sheep, a wallpaper the illusion of a column and a cupboard regained a two-dimensional quality under the weight of its relief-like ornamentation. Functionality and statics play a subordinate role, materials appear other than they are, pieces of furniture develop a life of their own. ‘Art is the endeavour to sense the invisible rhythms that surround us, to find their law, to clarify the chaos,’ says Peche. He was born in Salzburg's Lungau region in 1887, and the landscape of his youth will always remain a place of longing; many of his floral ornaments, organically flowing forms and lines are modelled on nature. Nikolaus Schaffer devotes himself to this aspect in the Arcadia chapter, and the entire catalogue is structured thematically. Rainald Franz writes about the metamorphoses in the decor of the ‘greatest ornamental genius’, Laura Steinhäußer about the uncanny, while Gabriele Kaiser takes us into the ‘veiled spaces’ of his temporary architecture and interiors.
Marco Dessí, Schrank Dagobert Peche Revisited, 2012Ausführung: Karl Neubauer, Birkensperrholz, Stahlrohr, gelb gefärbt, © MAK
Ornamental genius
Peche actually wanted to become a painter, but studied architecture at the Technical University and the Academy of Fine Arts at his father's request. His teacher there, Friedrich Ohmann, encouraged his emotional approach to objects and his talent as a draughtsman. The founder of the Wiener Werkstätten, Josef Hoffmann, who for his part highly valued the square and strived for the Gesamtkunstwerk, was also a great patron and admirer. ‘Not once every hundred years, perhaps once every three hundred years, is such a genius born in a country. Dagobert Peche was the greatest ornamental genius that Austria has possessed since the Baroque era,’ Josef Hoffmann remarked. In 1915, he had brought him to the Wiener Werkstätte as a designer, and a year later Peche staged the fashion exhibition in the former Austrian Museum of Art and Industry (ÖMKI), now the MAK. He transformed Heinrich von Ferstel's columned hall with lots of fabric, frilly curtains on the walls and showcases into a white and pink tulle world with mysterious corridors lined with dark wallpaper. Peche biographer Max Eisler attests to the room's ‘strange festivity, a mixture of exclusive elegance and rural cheerfulness.’
Shortly afterwards, Peche became head of the Wiener Werkstätte branch in Zurich, for whose shop he designed display cabinets with rectangular supports painted with leaves in different colours and lines and supporting a canopy. Leaf motifs sprouted from the wallpaper and a bouquet of flowers adorned the conical flue of the round tiled stove. In 1919, he returned to a Vienna that had been completely shattered by the First World War. There was no housing, much misery and tuberculosis. Peche also found only a desolate, dilapidated place to live, fell ill with cancer and died in 1923. He had barely ten years left to create a uniquely unconventional, independent and deeply personal work.
Hans Hollein, Tisch Schwarzenberg, 1980, Ausführung: Memphis, Mailand, Maserholz, furniert; Holz, schwarz gebeizt und vergoldet, © MAK
Pop and postmodernity
‘It is no coincidence that many of Dagobert Peche's designs evoke associations with postmodernism. The questioning of familiar proportions and typologies and the neglect of static and functional aspects in favour of an exuberant wealth of decorative forms make his furniture in particular appear almost proto-postmodern,’ writes Sebastian Hackenschmidt. There are certainly analogies to be found in the work of Adolf Krischanitz, Hans Hollein, Alessandro Mendini and even Gio Ponti. ‘However, it is difficult to juxtapose Peche's furniture with postmodern counterparts that are so idiosyncratic, playful and extravagant.’
This contribution written Isabella Marboe is from our media partner genau!
Lilli Hollein, Claudia Cavallar & Anne-Katrin Rossberg (eds.), ‘Peche Pop: Dagobert Peche and his traces in the present’, with contributions by Claudia Cavallar, Brigitte Felderer, Rainald Franz, Sebastian Hackenschmidt, Lilli Hollein, Gabriele Kaiser, Kathrin Pokorny-Nagel, Anne-Katrin Rossberg, Nikolaus Schaffer, Janis Staggs & Lara Steinhäußer. 21 x 28 cm. 306 p. with 375 illustrations, softcover, German and English, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, Cologne 2024, ISBN: 978-3-7533-0745-9
The exhibition ‘Peche Pop - Dagobert Peche and his traces in the present’ runs until 11 May 2025 at the Museum of Applied Arts MAK Vienna
