id: 110923
accession number: 1929.438
share license status: Copyrighted
url: https://clevelandart.org/art/1929.438
updated: 2020-11-04 19:45:06.508000
Figure of The Water (Das Wasser) from the Female Heads (Frauenkopf) Series, c. 1924-25. Bimini Werkstatten, Dina Kuhn (Austrian, 1891-1963). 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
title: Figure of The Water (Das Wasser) from the Female Heads (Frauenkopf) Series
title in original language:
series:
series in original language:
creation date: c. 1924-25
creation date earliest: 1924
creation date latest: 1925
current location:
creditline: Dudley P. Allen Fund
copyright:
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culture: Austria, Vienna
technique: earthenware
department: Decorative Art and Design
collection: Decorative Arts
type: Ceramic
find spot:
catalogue raisonne:
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CREATORS
* Bimini Werkstatten - maker
* Dina Kuhn (Austrian, 1891-1963) - designer
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 Čižek, 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 Werkstätte, 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.
In 1925 she was awarded a silver medal for her designs at the Exposition Internationale des arts décoratifs 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 Wächtersbach.
After the Second World War, Kuhn retired from working life. She died on May 28,1963, in Schlierbach.
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measurements: Overall: 36.9 x 19.7 x 18.5 cm (14 1/2 x 7 3/4 x 7 5/16 in.)
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support materials:
inscriptions:
inscription: inscribed lower left: D.K.
translation:
remark:
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CURRENT EXHIBITIONS
title: The Sea
opening date: 1950-09-23T04:00:00
The Sea. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (September 23-October 25, 1950).
title: Rouault: Retrospective Exhibition 1953
opening date: 1953-01-28T05:00:00
Rouault: Retrospective Exhibition 1953. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (January 28-March 15, 1953).
title: Circa 1930
opening date: 1983-04-12T04:00:00
Circa 1930. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (April 12-October 31, 1983).
title: The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s
opening date: 2017-04-07T00:00:00
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).
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LEGACY EXHIBITIONS
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PROVENANCE
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fun fact:
This figure was likely purchased from an exhibition of works that had been displayed at the 1925 world's fair in Paris.
digital 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 ceramicist 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.
wall description:
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