Josef Hoffmann Artwork valuations, appraisals and auction estimates

Josef Franz Maria Hoffmann (Brtnice, 15 December 1870 – Vienna, 7 May 1956) was one of the major Austrian architects, active between the end of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. An exponent of the Viennese Secession, with the architect Otto Wagner, among others, already his teacher at the Vienna Academy, he was also a designer, whose work, characterized by a thrust and essential geometric abstraction (his prevalent squares are typical), opens the new century in a decidedly modernistic key. Read the full biography

Josef Franz Maria Hoffmann (Brtnice, 15 December 1870 – Vienna, 7 May 1956) was one of the major Austrian architects, active between the end of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. An exponent of the Viennese Secession, with the architect Otto Wagner, among others, already his teacher at the Vienna Academy, he was also a designer, whose work, characterized by a thrust and essential geometric abstraction (his prevalent squares are typical), opens the new century in a decidedly modernistic key. For the Secession magazine, Ver Sacrum, published between 1898 and 1903, he created illustrations (in particular, various furnishing projects for domestic interiors, or for exhibition pavilions), decorative friezes and cartoons: characteristic elaborations of the Austrian Jugendstil. He then took care of the staging of the periodic Viennese Secession exhibitions in the pavilion built for the purpose in 1898 by Joseph Maria Olbrich, and played an important role in the European launch of the Scottish Charles Rennie Mackintosh; the young architect from Glasgow was invited to exhibit at the 1900 exhibition the design creations of the group of four artists of which he was, so to speak, the director. In 1903 Hoffmann founded with his colleague Koloman Moser and the financier and art lover Fritz Wärndorfer the Wiener Werkstätte, an association of designers, artists and producers (closed in 1932) inspired by the similar English ones that arose about twenty years ago, set up according to the Morrisian aesthetic movement of artistic craftsmanship of Arts and Crafts. In 1987 the Museum für angewandte Kunst (MAK) in Vienna organized an exhibition entitled "Josef Hoffmann: Ornament zwischen Hoffnung und Verbrechen". In 1992 the MAK conceived together with the Moravian Gallery in Brnoan exhibition in the Christmas house "Josef Hoffmann Museum" in Brtnice and since 2006 the two institutions have presided over the management with equal rights. The museum presents a permanent exhibition and special exhibitions on the architect and his contemporaries are also conceived.