by (designer) Remigius Geyling
a Ceremonial Ball Donation
circa 1911
Designed in honour of ‘the city of Vienna’ and ‘Wilhelm Melzer’ (as inscribed), this squat four-legged oval jewel shares a great aesthetic resemblance with the makings of the Wiener Werkstätte. The visual perception of the box’s weight relies much on the relationship of its proportions: emphasis is placed on the delicacy of its minuscule feet by way of being shadowed under the box’s low-slung, wide belly, while the belly itself boasts of a supposed ‘inner’ strength and definitive solidity of form when, in fact, its bowels are spacious. The language of this type of artistic relationship is idiosyncratic of this period in time, when durability and stamina were defined by the quality of contouring and decorative concentration found on an object of art. Pieces made by those involved in the Wiener Werkstätte are heavily imbued with this value, wherein details such as colour, texture and form are combined to embrace the Gesamtkunstwerk, or the ‘total work of art’, so as to advocate the marriage of artist and creation into a single entity. A direct fruition of the Viennese workshop(s’) core ideals, this box remains a sturdy individual of turn-of-the-century craft, with its four rice-grain limbs acting to support a weight both immeasurable and eternal on the face of history.
