Style to Spare
July 2008
History has not looked kindly on the Biedermeier aesthetic. For nearly two centuries, the unadorned central European style was seen as the very embodiment of bourgeois ordinariness, lacking imagination. Its simple, utilitarian-looking designs were attributed to the economic exhaustion that followed the Napoleonic Wars. But recent scholarship suggests that such a derisive approach was based on misunderstanding, and today Biedermeier is being recast as a highly cultivated movement that anticipated Modernist furniture design.The misunderstanding began with one Wieland Gottlieb Biedermaier—not a real person but a fictional Everyman created by two German satirists in the late 1840s. A Munich magazine featured Biedermaier’s uneventful daily activities and naive poems as a means of poking gentle fun at its middle-class readership. The name was derived from the word bieder, meaning “plain,” and the common surname Meier, the German equivalent of Smith or Jones. At the end of the 19th century, the word Biedermeier (now spelled with the “e”) was applied, with strictly pejorative intent, to the art and culture of the first half of the century. This usage fostered the negative perception that during those years furniture and works of art were made quickly and cheaply in response to middle-class demand and suited to bad middle-class taste.
Despite this snap judgment, Biedermeier has proved rather difficult to pin down. It has been identified variously as a branch of Romanticism, a late manifestation of Neoclassicism, and a prelude to mid–19th century Realism. Its dates have been equally elusive. Some art historians end the period in 1835, with the death of the Austrian Emperor Franz I, while others maintain that it continued until the outbreak of the leftist revolutions that spread across the German-speaking lands and much of the rest of Europe in 1848.The essential building blocks of the Biedermeier style—simplicity, wit, clarity of line, and geometry of form—stand in stark contrast to the forms, ornaments, and symbols from classical antiquity that adorned the Empire-style furnishings fashionable during the reign of Napolèon Bonaparte. With the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, a period of relative stability and peace came to Europe, resulting in vigorous cultural exchange between Vienna, Copenhagen, Berlin, and Munich. This environment gave rise to fresh aesthetic principles and a new approach to form and color in everything from furniture to painting to the decorative arts and even architecture. The word Biedermeier—now freed from its historic baggage—describes not just a furniture style but an overarching aesthetic that touched all the arts.
Biedermeier peaked between 1810 and 1825, when new ideas about private life and domestic space were beginning to filter through central and northern Europe. Innovations in furniture for seating are probably the best-known developments of the period. A tidal wave of novel designs for chairs and settees emerged, and technical advances allowed craftsmen to make some important leaps forward. In the construction of upholstered furniture, metal box springs made chairs more comfortable, and the trend toward a lighter, more portable chair freed designers to experiment with chair backs and upholstery fabrics.
Seating furniture, cabinet furniture, and tables evolved rapidly into simpler designs. For a circa 1810–15 white settee, Viennese furniture maker Josef Ulrich Danhauser used drapery, borders, and cords to create a surface pattern that alleviates the somewhat ponderous character of the piece. Though the settee bears remnants of the French Empire style, it clearly anticipates the more simplified kind of form that emerged in the next decade. In a settee made about 10 years later, it is the upholstery, in brilliant orange with contrasting blue cording, that assumes the weight-bearing, tectonic function. This settee is so modern-looking that it easily could be mistaken for something from the 1920s or even the 1960s.
As designers and consumers gradually became accustomed to the new ideas that were challenging the comforts of the known, a broad spectrum of designs became available on the market. Take, for example, two Vienna writing cabinets. Both are lyre-shaped luxury pieces crafted with precious woods and veneers, yet the first cabinet reflects the lingering influence of the French Empire style in its sculptural decoration and gilding, while the second relies on the natural persuasive powers of the wood’s grain as well as the geometric surface pattern that the contrasting ebonized banding creates. Look inside, and the abundance of drawers shows the increasing desire for privacy. As an impressive object of display, the writing cabinet served purposes both functional and representational.
During the Biedermeier era, interiors changed along with furniture designs. New apartments, built to accommodate growing populations, often featured pairs of windows that looked onto busy streets or well-kept gardens. Cultural life came to be centered primarily in the home, where families delighted in their elegant, well-ordered lives. In genre painting and portraiture from this period, sitters are almost always shown in their own homes or gardens, and their furnishings are affectionately depicted.This concept of the interior is represented in Georg Friedrich Kersting’s small, private interiors populated by friends and family members, as in his painting “Woman Embroidering.” Kersting and other artists of his time took up the “window picture” popularized by German Romantic painters, notably Kersting’s friend and colleague Caspar David Friedrich. However, rather than the mystical and spiritual aspects of nature extolled in Romanticism, the simple pleasures it provides triumphed in Biedermeier paintings. For Friedrich, the open window was a symbol conveying a sense of yearning for nature and the external world. For Kersting, it reinforced the primacy and comfort of the interior world and the identification of sitters with their domestic surroundings. In “View From the Artist’s Studio in Alservorstadt Toward Dornbach,” the Austrian painter Jakob Alt lovingly portrays his own interior space. An empty chair serves as a surrogate for the physical presence of the artist, and a window provides an unobstructed view of the town.
The decorative arts capture the same brilliant hues and sensuous forms so characteristic of Biedermeier furniture and painting: wall-papers, textiles, porcelain, and glass all display an unexpected exuberance of color and pattern. In some cases, uninterrupted chromatic fields define form; in others, contrast between colors performs the same function. Designers achieved an effect of simplicity in bold, vivid wallpapers by treating the wall as a single decorative whole giving shape to the entire room. Contemporary theories of color perception recommended the use of bold complementary colors—such as blue and orange or red and green—for upholstery and furnishings in order to provide a healthful, stimulating living environment. White and gray were limited to accents and draperies and often functioned as borders for strong colors and patterns in a Biedermeier household.
The modern, pared-down aesthetic of Biedermeier appeals to collectors of 20th-century design and contemporary painting. The demand for Biedermeier furnishings has skyrocketed in recent years, and the best works—which show a love of natural materials, a simplicity of form, and an energetic use of color—are increasingly difficult to find. Such pieces were produced in that first flush of creativity, circa 1805–25, when the artists and craftsmen were full of the spirit of invention. As with so many artistic movements, works produced late in the Biedermeier period are often repetitive, tired, and formulaic in design.
Recent scholarly research has revealed that rather than being a middle-class phenomenon, the Biedermeier rejection of extravagant ornamentation in favor of proportion and utility was actually initiated largely by the aristocracy, who wanted to rid their living quarters of the indoctrinated French style. Only later did the emerging bourgeoisie embrace it. Hans Ottomeyer, general director of the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin, has suggested that “the cult of simplicity developed itself as a principle of beauty in contrast to the luxurious style of the close of the 18th century. Whoever could afford to pay for it acquired new decoration in the new style of unpretentiousness.”
With the dawning of Modernism, the allure of unpretentiousness grew even stronger. In furniture, painting, and decorative art, the influence of Biedermeier’s core principles was felt in the European Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th century and the Wiener Werkstätte of the early 20th, and it continues to inspire designers and artists today.
Iliad Antik, New York
212.935.4382, iliadantik.com
Karl Kemp and Associates, Ltd., New York
212.254.1877, karlkemp.com
Rita Bucheit Ltd., Chicago
312.527.4080, ritabucheit.com
Ritter Antik, New York
212.673.2213, biedermeier-ritter.com