the ‘KKZ’(?) or ‘YPW’(?) Austrian Primary School
Portfolio (with blank sheets within)
circa 1913
This appears to be a gift made by teachers for parting ‘children of the third year course’, as the lettering below the illustration roughly reads. It is a blank folio, clearly stippled together with care, whose cover decoration pays homage to the contemporary Viennese tastes in art of the 1910s. It is difficult to determine from this photograph, however, whether the illustration is an original work or whether it is merely a replicated form of an original. If, as the inscription implies, the folio was indeed made by a teaching institution for its young pupils, it seems unlikely that the school would have afforded the expense of colour-printing copies of this illustration for an indefinite handful of students. It is probable that, rather than making one for each student, the teachers crafted this single folio for the entirety of the third year course, making it an all the more memorable and commemorative piece for the children as a whole. This is a theory that supports the idea that the illustration is an original painted piece, with the additional details of the loosely-sewn binding, the slightly jagged-edged pages (of which there are only a few) and the marginally off-centred cover illustration itself (laterally) further proving that this portfolio was assembled without the aid of fancy machines. It is undoubtedly a fragile piece of the past, made of only paper and glue and string, but it is nonetheless a gift that has endured more than one hundred years of life so far, with its black papery skin nearly as tough and new as it was on its first day as is its painted vase of bright oranges and greens and blues to this day still.
