{
"data": {
"id": 110923,
"accession_number": "1929.438",
"share_license_status": "Copyrighted",
"tombstone": "Figure of The Water (Das Wasser) from the Female Heads (Frauenkopf) Series, c. 1924\u201325. Bimini Werkst\u00e4tten (Austrian, Vienna, 1923\u20131955), Dina Kuhn (Austrian, 1891\u20131963). Earthenware; overall: 36.9 x 19.7 x 18.5 cm (14 1/2 x 7 3/4 x 7 5/16 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Dudley P. Allen Fund, 1929.438",
"current_location": null,
"title": "Figure of The Water (Das Wasser) from the Female Heads (Frauenkopf) Series",
"creation_date": "c. 1924\u201325",
"creation_date_earliest": 1924,
"creation_date_latest": 1925,
"artists_tags": [
"female",
"gender unknown"
],
"culture": [
"Austria, Vienna"
],
"technique": "earthenware",
"support_materials": [],
"department": "Decorative Art and Design",
"collection": "Decorative Arts",
"type": "Ceramic",
"measurements": "Overall: 36.9 x 19.7 x 18.5 cm (14 1/2 x 7 3/4 x 7 5/16 in.)",
"dimensions": {
"overall": {
"height": 0.369,
"height_inch": 14,
"height_inch_fraction": 0.5,
"width": 0.197,
"width_inch": 7,
"width_inch_fraction": 0.75,
"depth": 0.185,
"depth_inch": 7,
"depth_inch_fraction": 0.3125
}
},
"state_of_the_work": null,
"edition_of_the_work": null,
"copyright": null,
"inscriptions": [
{
"inscription": "inscribed lower left: D.K.",
"inscription_translation": null,
"inscription_remark": null,
"sortorder": null
}
],
"exhibitions": {
"current": [
{
"id": 311945,
"title": "The Sea",
"description": "The Sea. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (September 23-October 25, 1950).",
"opening_date": "1950-09-23T04:00:00"
},
{
"id": 311918,
"title": "Rouault: Retrospective Exhibition",
"description": "Rouault: Retrospective Exhibition. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (January 28-March 15, 1953).",
"opening_date": "1953-01-28T05:00:00"
},
{
"id": 300831,
"title": "John Marin Memorial Exhibition",
"description": "John Marin Memorial Exhibition. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (November 17, 1955-January 1, 1956); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA (March 1-October 13, 1956); The Phillips Collection (March 1-October 13, 1956); Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN (March 1-October 13, 1956); Fowler Museum at UCLA, Los Angeles, CA (March 1-October 13, 1956); Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Boston, MA (March 1-October 13, 1956).",
"opening_date": "1955-11-17T05:00:00"
},
{
"id": 309667,
"title": "Circa 1930",
"description": "Circa 1930. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (April 12-October 31, 1983).",
"opening_date": "1983-04-12T05:00:00"
},
{
"id": 200463,
"title": "The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s",
"description": "The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, NY (April 7-August 20, 2017); The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (September 30, 2017-January 14, 2018).",
"opening_date": "2017-04-07T00:00:00"
}
],
"legacy": []
},
"provenance": [],
"find_spot": null,
"related_works": [],
"former_accession_numbers": [],
"did_you_know": "This figure was likely purchased from an exhibition of works that had been displayed at the 1925 world's fair in Paris.",
"early_education_description": null,
"artlens_description": null,
"description": "Conceived as part of a series of allegorical female heads, The Water (Das Wasser) connects ideas of spirituality, feminism, and humanism in an age when female artists and designers were being taken seriously in the commercial artistic community as never before. This figure by Viennese ceramist Dina Kuhn, one of only four known of the same subject, was modeled shortly after Kuhn took up her position as head of ceramic design at the Bimini workshop in Vienna, known for its glass production. The figure was displayed at the 1925 world's fair in Paris and subsequently toured the United States in an exhibition of curated works from that fair. Such strong depictions of women had a profound impact on young sculptors and designers working in clay in America, among them Viktor Schreckengost, whose early style closely followed that of Kuhn and the artistic community in Vienna.",
"external_resources": {
"wikidata": [
"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q80003098"
],
"internet_archive": []
},
"citations": [
{
"citation": "Coffin, Sarah D., and Stephen Harrison. The Jazz Age: American style in the 1920s. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2017.",
"page_number": "Reproduced: fig. 317, p. 260; Mentioned: p. 258",
"url": ""
}
],
"url": "https://clevelandart.org/art/1929.438",
"images": {},
"alternate_images": [],
"creditline": "Dudley P. Allen Fund",
"image_credit": null,
"sketchfab_id": null,
"sketchfab_url": null,
"gallery_donor_text": null,
"athena_id": 110923,
"creators": [
{
"id": 8806,
"description": "Bimini Werkst\u00e4tten (Austrian, Vienna, 1923\u20131955)",
"extent": null,
"qualifier": null,
"role": "maker",
"biography": null,
"name_in_original_language": null,
"death_year": "1955",
"use_in_caption": true,
"include_extent": false,
"weight": 0
},
{
"id": 8809,
"description": "Dina Kuhn (Austrian, 1891\u20131963)",
"extent": null,
"qualifier": null,
"role": "designer",
"biography": "Dina Kuhn was born on April 26, 1891 in Vienna. She began an eight-year course at the arts and crafts school in Vienna in 1912. Her teachers included the architect and designer Josef Hoffmann, the painter and designer Franz \u010ci\u017eek, the painter and graphic artist Kolomon Moser, the architect Oskar Strnad, and the ceramist Michael Powolny. During her apprenticeship, Dina Kuhn designed ceramics for the Wiener Werkst\u00e4tte, which she joined in 1917. By 1922 she had created about 100 designs for ceramic figures, wallpapers and fabric samples for the community. In 1923 she founded her own ceramic studio, the art ceramic workshop Dina Kuhn, together with her brother and Emanuel Iskra. She designed ceramic chimney cladding, tiles, stoves, lamps, and vases and worked closely with the stove factory Iska. Dina Kuhn also designed ceramic objects for the Friedrich Goldscheider factory, the Augarten porcelain factory and for the Bimini glass factory founded in 1923 in the mid-1920s.\r In 1925 she was awarded a silver medal for her designs at the Exposition Internationale des arts d\u00e9coratifs et industriels moderne in Paris. In 1926, the Bimini company decided to expand its production to handicraft ceramics. They set up a ceramic studio in Neu Titschein near Ostrau, whose artistic direction was taken over by Dina Kuhn until 1937. The repression by the Nazis against Jewish entrepreneurs, forced the owners of Bimini, August and Josef Berger and Fritz Lampl, to emigrate. Dina Kuhn left Neu Titschein and in 1937 made first contacts with the ceramics manufacturer Waechtersbach, where she worked as a decorator and modeler after 1938. In August 1940, she moved permanently to Schlierbach. Some designs from the Viennese creative period were later carried out by in W\u00e4chtersbach.\r After the Second World War, Kuhn retired from working life. She died on May 28,1963, in Schlierbach.",
"name_in_original_language": null,
"birth_year": "1891",
"death_year": "1963",
"use_in_caption": true,
"include_extent": false,
"weight": 1
}
],
"legal_status": "accessioned",
"accession_date": "1929-05-16T00:00:00",
"sortable_date": 1924,
"date_added_to_oa": null,
"date_text": "c. 1924\u201325",
"collapse_artists": false,
"on_loan": false,
"recently_acquired": false,
"record_type": "object",
"conservation_statement": null,
"has_conservation_images": false,
"cover_accession_number": null,
"is_nazi_era_provenance": false,
"impression": null,
"alternate_titles": [],
"is_highlight": false,
"updated_at": "2026-05-01 06:47:30.521000"
}
}