Box with Lid, model number 309
A prodigious artist, Dagobert Peche worked in many different media throughout his career, including textiles, wallpaper, metalwork, ceramics, glass, lighting devices, and furniture. Despite the diversity of this material, Peche’s works all speak the same design language, effortlessly blending whimsy with sophistication. His imaginative forms and playful decoration are as exuberant, charming, and dynamic today as they were a century ago. The earliest significant article describing Peche’s work declared, “Thanks to [Peche’s] imagination, we become even more aware of how much we are missing. It opens to our astonished, delighted eyes to a world in which we lived as children. What was only a dream, a vision, takes on the form of reality. It is a play of colors of exquisite harmony, a drizzle of delicious pearls that fills us with pleasure.”1
Perhaps this well of creative energy is why Peche had originally hoped to become a painter like his brother, Ernst, but his father convinced him to study architecture. Peche attended Vienna’s Technische Hochschule (College of Technology) and Akademie der Bildenden Künst (Academy of Fine Arts). In 1911 he completed his studies and became acquainted with Josef Hoffmann, cofounder of the Weiner Werkstätte. Following their chance meeting, Peche soon began collaborating with the Wiener Werkstätte and was named the artistic director of the workshop in 1915. Peche’s fanciful yet refined design style strongly influenced the output of the Weiner Werkstätte, but his promising career was cut short when he died suddenly from a rare and aggressive form of abdominal cancer at the age of thirty-six.2
Peche’s design for this lidded, octagonal ceramic box dates from the early years of his career, before he began working full-time for the Wiener Werkstätte. This box exemplifies Peche’s design aesthetic with the vitality and whimsy of the painted butterflies, flowers, and stars standing in contrast to the orderly geometric elegance of its octagonal shape. It was manufactured by the Vereinigte Wiener and Gmundner Keramik (United Potteries of Vienna and Gmunden), with whom he started working in 1912.3 The company produced various designs by Peche, some of which were included in the Exhibition of Austrian Crafts in the winter of 1913–14, as well as the 1914 exhibition in Cologne organized by the German Werkbund. In fact, a nearly identical example of the lidded box in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, may have been on display in the Austrian Pavilion of the 1914 Werkbund exhibition.4
Vereinigte Wiener and Gmundner Keramik continued to produce this particular version of the ceramic box into the 1920s. The lidded, octagonal form was also available with different variations of painted ornament, although black and white floral-inspired designs predominated. The example in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, retains its original sales label from the manufacturer, which reveals that it was sold sometime between 1923 and 1925. In addition, the factory stamp indicates that it was made between 1913 and 1923. Thus, the Museum’s example was likely made in 1923.5 —Sarah Marie Horne
Notes
1. Translated from the original German. Rene Delhorbe, “Architekt Dagobert Peche – Wien,” in Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration (1913): 363–64.
2. For a timeline of Dagobert Peche’s life see Peter Noever, ed., Dagobert Peche and the Wiener Werkstätte (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press and Neue Galerie New York, 2002), 17–33.
3. He also designed ceramics for the Wiener Werkstatte and Josef Bock Porcelain. Malcolm Haslam, Marks and Monograms of the Modern Movement, 1875–1930 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1977), 72.
4. The book Österreichische Werkkultur (1916) describes Werkbund exhibitions in Cologne and Leipzig in 1914, followed by a catalogue of images showcasing the work of its members, which included Dagobert Peche. The text explains that, although not all members of the Werkbund were represented in the catalogue, the aim was to show the entire range of production across the organization. A lidded box of the same design as the one in the AIA, Houston’s Design Collection was chosen for inclusion in the section presenting Austrian ceramics. Although there is ample evidence that Peche’s works were included in the exhibition, it is unclear if this particular example was exhibited or simply included in the later catalogue as a representative work. See Max Eisler, Österreichische Werkkultur (Vienna: A. Schroll & Company, 1916).
5. Correspondence with Gmundner Keramik staff, January 13, 2023.