For a number of years the NGV has been steadily building its holdings of black-and-white ceramics by the early twentieth-century Viennese ceramicist Michael Powolny. The display of Powolny’s ceramics sits within the Gallery’s broader collections of early twentieth-century Viennese modernism which are of international standing. Acquisitions have been generously supported by a number of donors including Merv Keehn and Sue Harlow, Joan Clemenger, Rob Gould, the NGVWA, and Peter and Ivanka Canet.
Michael Powolny was one of the leading Viennese ceramic artists of the period. He was born in Judenburg, Austria in 1871 and trained as a potter in his father’s workshop before attending the Technological Institute for Ceramics in Znaim and completing his studies at the Vienna School of Applied Arts, where he concentrated on sculpting. In 1897, alongside Josef Hoffmann, Koloman Moser, Gustav Klimt and other leading artists, designers and architects, Powolny became a founding member of the Vienna Secession, an organisation of disaffected young artists seeking to create a new, modern Viennese style in opposition to the conservative cultural institutions dominating artistic life in Austria.
Following Hoffmann and Moser’s 1903 establishment of the Wiener Werkstätte, an experimental co-operative of workshops and craftspeople, Powolny founded the ceramic firm Wiener Keramik in 1906, along with the graphic designer and illustrator Berthold Löffler and sculptor Gustav Lang, who left soon after. In the experimental spirit of the Wiener Werkstätte, Powolny and Löffler began producing their first vases in a highly modernist, strictly geometric aesthetic of cylindrical and cuboid forms. The first year was precarious and few worksappear to have sold but the following year the Wiener Werkstätte took on the sale and distribution of the firm’s ceramics and this close artistic and economic relationship became of fundamental importance to the Wiener Keramik as it enabled the firm’s productions to reach a broader audience across Europe. It was also vital to Powolny and Löffler, who received important commissions through the Wiener Werkstätte. Like the workshops of the Wiener Werkstätte, the Wiener Keramik became a testing ground for the development of the so-called modern Viennese style to which members of the Vienna Secession aspired.
Over the next six years the Wiener Keramik produced some 330 models, including vases, covered boxes, desk sets, centrepieces, bowls, mirrors and clocks. Trained in ceramic modelling and familiar with the artistic innovations of other Secession artists, Powolny was the driving force and produced the majority of models. Löffler often began his designs as a ceramicist before handing them over to other artists to finish, whereas Powolny worked on his own models from start to finish.
Powolny and Löffler presented their ceramics at every major Wiener Werkstätte exhibition, and in 1912 their exhibition activity culminated in the Spring Exhibition of Austrian Applied Arts, held in the then Imperial Royal Austrian Museum of Art and Industry, now the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna. Here they exhibited a room with exuberant wall decorations designed by Löffler and two vitrines designed by Hoffmann, which were placed on opposite walls and filled with Powolny and Löffler’s decorative black-and-white ceramics.
Powolny also displayed two large putti figures on tall plinths, which were illustrative of the architectural scale of decorative figures in which he also specialised. Until this point Powolny and Löffler’s ceramics had been produced in highly coloured, glossy glazes or, at times, a palette of white and gold, but around 1911 or 1912 they introduced a dramatic shift in approach, adopting a monochromatic palette of black and white. This presentation of so many ceramics densely displayed in the two vitrines must have been an extraordinary moment. The graphic nature of their black-and-white decoration provided an intense visual counterpoint to the highly coloured and decorated walls of the room. It is this unique display of Powolny and Löffler’s black-and-white ceramics in the Hoffmann- designed vitrines that has inspired the NGV’s development of its own representation of these very particular works, as well as its decision to display them in the Vitrine, from the Gallia apartment boudoir, 1913, also designed by Hoffmann (Purchased Samuel E. Wills Bequest, 1976).
Two of the most recent acquisitions to enter the NGV Collection, Cupid (Amor), designed 1910–12, manufactured 1913–16, and Covered box with grape carriers (Traubentrager dose), designed 1911–12, manufactured 1913–15, reflect Powolny’s deep interest in the putto figure. Both works have been generously supported by the Marjorie Josephs-Wilks Bequest. From around 1910, the putto became a central motif within Powolny’s design oeuvre and it is now inextricably associated with his work. The origins of the putto figure, a winged male child associated with love and sexual desire, extend back to Classical antiquity and it has recurred as a decorative motif throughout history.
While many of Powolny’s models with putti appear to be purely decorative, others are clearly allegorical, including his model of Cupid, ornamented with a quiver tied around the figure’s middle and bow and arrow grasped behind his back. Powolny has further emphasised the allegorical meaning by ornamenting the front edge of the plinth with a stanza from Goethe’s 1776 poem ‘Rastlose Liebe’ (‘Restless Love’): KRONE DES LEBENS GLÜCK OHNE RUH LIEBE, BIST DU! (‘Crown of life, happiness without peace – this, O love, is you!).
The Covered box with grape carriers is also allegorical, being clearly associated with Bacchus, the Roman god of wine and bacchanalian revelry. Nevertheless, the playful, almost absurd juxtaposition of scale between the enormous bunch of grapes and the two children struggling under its weight is typical of Powolny’s designs, as is the sense of dynamic movement between the figures. Powolny’s masterful use of black outline to delineate form, contrasted with the solid black of the grapes, stylised details and the formal chequerboard pattern around the plinth, transforms this otherwise traditional figure group into a self-consciously modern twentieth- century sculpture, an approach typical of Viennese modernism.
Despite this striking new approach to decoration and the Wiener Keramik’s artistic success, Powolny and Löffler’s business was unable to achieve financial success, and in 1913, it merged with Gmundner Keramik to form the Vereinigte Wiener und Gmundner Keramik, which continued to produce many of the Wiener Keramik models until its closure in 1923.
Amanda Dunsmore is NGV Senior Curator, International Decorative Arts & Antiquities.
The NGV warmly thanks all those who helped acquire these works for the Collection.
This essay was first published in NGV Magazine | Issue 60 Sep-Oct 2026.