Description

In the 1920s the Vienna Workshop (Wiener Werkstätte) promoted the work of prominent toy designers as serious expressions of art to be studied alongside other artistic genres such as painting and sculpture admired by adults. Artisans like Karl Hagenauer and Reinhold Duschka, working in Vienna during the years before the First World War, embraced the concept that within every child is an artist and in every artist there is a child. This idea conveyed a sense of liberation from the strictures of formality and tradition.The colorful compositions and sense of whimsy in their designs for children reflected Viennese decorative art in general between the wars.