Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum (Museum for Social and Economic Affairs) is a museum located in Margareten, Vienna.
Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum (Museum for Social and Economic Affairs) is a museum located in Margareten, Vienna.
Following World War I, Vienna experienced extreme devastation and deprivation which radicalized architects and designers. This inspired them to engage in class politics and confront the city’s housing shortage. The Gesellschafts-und Wirtschaftmuseum (also known as the Museum of Society and Business) was established in 1924. [1]
The original Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum (GeWiMu) existed from January 1925 until it was suppressed by the Austrofascists in February 1934. It was the base for the development of the Vienna Method. It was founded by Otto Neurath and evolved out of the Museum für Siedlung und Städtebau (Museum for Settlement and Town Planning). This had been set up following Neurath's involvement in the Austrian Association for Settlements and Small Gardens. [2] The museum developed a collaborative relationship with the Otto Glöckel. [3] In 1927, Willem Sandberg visited Vienna, where he studied the Isotype system at the museum. [4] In 1928 Neurath recruited Gerd Arntz from Düsseldorf to lead the Art and Design team there. Arntz was originally unsure about whether to take up the job offer, but thanks to the encouragement of Franz Seiwert he accepted and was soon joined by Peter Alma and Augustin Tschinkel, both also associated with the Cologne Progressives, the art group Seiwert and Arntz had set up.
The GeWiMu was the home of one of the most significant developments in graphic design: the Vienna Method. This evolved out of Neurath's desire to produce informational material which was understandable regardless of the language skills of the onlooker.
Otto Karl Wilhelm Neurath was an Austrian-born philosopher of science, sociologist, and political economist. He was also the inventor of the ISOTYPE method of pictorial statistics and an innovator in museum practice. Before he fled his native country in 1934, Neurath was one of the leading figures of the Vienna Circle.
The Deutscher Werkbund is a German association of artists, architects, designers, and industrialists, established in 1907. The Werkbund became an important element in the development of modern architecture and industrial design, particularly in the later creation of the Bauhaus school of design. Its initial purpose was to establish a partnership of product manufacturers with design professionals to improve the competitiveness of German companies in global markets. The Werkbund was less an artistic movement than a state-sponsored effort to integrate traditional crafts and industrial mass production techniques, to put Germany on a competitive footing with England and the United States. Its motto Vom Sofakissen zum Städtebau indicates its range of interest.
Max Theodor Felix von Laue was a German physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1914 for his discovery of the diffraction of X-rays by crystals. In addition to his scientific endeavors with contributions in optics, crystallography, quantum theory, superconductivity, and the theory of relativity, he had a number of administrative positions which advanced and guided German scientific research and development during four decades. A strong objector to Nazism, he was instrumental in re-establishing and organizing German science after World War II.
Constructivism was an artistic and architectural philosophy that originated in Russia beginning in 1915 by Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko. Abstract and austere, constructivist art aimed to reflect modern industrial society and urban space. The movement rejected decorative stylization in favor of the industrial assemblage of materials. Constructivists were in favour of art for propaganda and social purposes, and were associated with Soviet socialism, the Bolsheviks and the Russian avant-garde.
Isotype is a method of showing social, technological, biological, and historical connections in pictorial form. It consists of a set of standardized and abstracted pictorial symbols to represent social-scientific data with specific guidelines on how to combine the identical figures using serial repetition. It was first known as the Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics, due to its having been developed at the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum in Wien between 1925 and 1934. The founding director of this museum, Otto Neurath, was the initiator and chief theorist of the Vienna Method. Gerd Arntz was the artist responsible for realising the graphics. The term Isotype was applied to the method around 1935, after its key practitioners were forced to leave Vienna by the rise of Austrian fascism.
Gerd Arntz was a German Modernist artist renowned for his black and white woodcuts. A core member of the Cologne Progressives he was also a council communist. The Cologne Progressives participated in the revolutionary unions AAUD (KAPD) and its offshoot the AAUE in the 1920s. In 1928 Arntz contributed prints to the AAUE paper Die Proletarische Revolution, calling for workers to abandon parliament and form and participate in worker's councils. These woodcut prints feature recurring themes of class.
The Vienna Künstlerhaus is an art exhibition building in Vienna. It is located on Karlsplatz near the Ringstraße, next to the Musikverein.
Marie Neurath, born Marie Reidemeister, was a German designer, social scientist and author. Neurath was a member of the team that developed a simplified pictographic language, the Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics, which she later renamed Isotype. She was also a prolific writer and designer of educational books for younger readers.
Otto Glöckel social-democratic politician and school-reformer during the First Austrian Republic. First Minister of Education during the First Austrian Republic from April 1919 to October 1920.
Jonkheer Willem Jacob Henri Berend Sandberg known as Willem Sandberg was a Dutch typographer, museum curator, and member of the Dutch resistance during World War II.
The German Mathematical Society is the main professional society of German mathematicians and represents German mathematics within the European Mathematical Society (EMS) and the International Mathematical Union (IMU). It was founded in 1890 in Bremen with the set theorist Georg Cantor as first president. Founding members included Georg Cantor, Felix Klein, Walther von Dyck, David Hilbert, Hermann Minkowski, Carl Runge, Rudolf Sturm, Hermann Schubert, and Heinrich Weber.
The Four Orchestral Pieces are four short orchestral pieces, which Anton Bruckner composed in the fall of 1862 during his tuition with Otto Kitzler.
Pseudorationalism was the label given by economist and philosopher Otto Neurath to a school of thought that he was heavily critical of, throughout many of his writings but primarily in his 1913 paper "The lost wanderers of Descartes and the auxiliary motive" and later to a lesser extent in his 1935 "Pseudorationalismus der Falsifikation", a review of and attack on Popper's first book, Logik der Forschung, contrasting this approach with his own view of what rationalism should properly be. Neurath aimed his criticism at a Cartesian belief that all actions can be subject to rational analysis, saying that
Once reason has gained a certain influence, people generally show a tendency to regard all their actions as reasonable. Ways of action which depend on dark instincts receive reinterpretation or obfuscation.
Robert Bleichsteiner was an Austrian ethnologist.
Peter Alma was a Dutch artist. Alma was born in Medan, Indonesia and attended the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague in 1904. On the recommendation of Franz Seiwert he was employed by the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum working with Gerd Arntz and Augustin Tschinkel on the development of Isotypes. He travelled to Moscow with Arntz and Otto Neurath to work at IZOSTAT to help them draw up pictorial images for statistics of the Five Year Plans. Alma was a member of Nederlandsche Vereeniging voor Ambachts- en Nijverheidskunst (V.A.N.K.) the Dutch Association for craft and craft art.
IZOSTAT (ИЗОСТАТ) was the "All-union Institute of Pictorial Statistics of Soviet Construction and Economy," an agency of the Soviet government that designed, created, published, and distributed graphic representations of Soviet industry that were easily understandable without written explanations. Founded as an educational unit, Izostat evolved into a producer of propaganda. It operated between 1931 and 1940.
The Austrian Settlement and Allotment Garden Association was an organisation established following the First World War to support people in need of housing and the allotment movement principally in and around Vienna.
Figurative Constructivism is an art movement that arose principally in Germany. The term was introduced by Franz Seiwert in 1929 using the phrase "gegenständlichen constructive", and this was subsequently taken up by Gerd Arntz and then by art historians more generally. It is closely related to the development of the Isotype. As Seiwert wrote "From the expressionist-cubist art-form abstract constructivism was developed, which in turn led into Figurative Constructivism".
Augustin Tschinkel was a Czech artist active with the Figurative Constructivist art movement.
Rudolf Modley was an Austrian-American research executive, graphic designer, management consultant and author, who founded Pictorial Statistics Inc. in 1934. He illustrated and wrote a series of books on pictorial statistics and pictorial symbolism.
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