ARTS AND CRAFTS:
WOODWORK,
REVERSE PAINTING ON GLASS AND
JEWELLERY

In addition to the obligatory painting and drawing courses, the Munich Ladies' Academy provided its members with a wide range of technical devices. These included a kiln for glass and ceramics.

It can be assumed that Ida Paulin made active use of this, experimented with glass colours and practiced a wide variety of firing techniques. In addition, she created reverse glass paintings, which she backed with fabrics or foils.

She also devoted herself to the material wood, designed and manufactured caskets, carved reliefs and picture frames, and tried out pyrography. In addition, the production of batiks, embroidery and lacquer paintings as well as the decoration of porcelain vessels and accessories were her focus.

Since the 1910s, Ida Paulin had also designed decorations for porcelain. For this purpose, she purchased inexpensive white ware with a focus on modernity as well as simple lines and shapes. The majority of these pieces date from the geometric Art Nouveau period, the most recent ones belong to the functional forms of the 1930s.

Paulin purchased from four porcelain factories: Arzberg, Fraureuth, Franz Heinrich and Lorenz Hutschenreuther in Selb. Furthermore, she commissioned the company Sontag & Söhne in Geiersthal to print crockery and decorative items with black ornamentations designed by her, which she finished with overglaze enamelling and gold.

The motifs she used were variations on leaf, spiral and dot ornaments, such as those in the stencilled designs by Ludwig Hohlwein or Otto Prutscher from Vienna. She received further artistic impulses from the Munich Secession, founded in 1892, as well as from the “Vereinigte Werkstätten für Kunst und Handwerk” (United Workshops for Arts and Crafts), which came into being a little later.

The motifs of the spiral and holly that Paulin liked to use originated in the Wiener Werkstätte, here especially in Michael Powolny's designs for “Vereinigte Wiener und Gmundner Keramik” from the early 1910s. She also took up the dentilwork, which the Nymphenburg Porcelain Manufactory had used since 1905. The adoption of all these motifs shows that Ida Paulin was able to draw on the broad spectrum of modern sources of inspiration known at the time.

From 1902 to 1906, Ida Paulin attended the Ladies' Academy of the Munich Association of Women Artists, whose broad and systematic training was largely based on the curricula of the Royal Bavarian Academy of Arts. Her teachers included the painter and illustrator Angelo Jank, who worked for the magazine "Jugend”, the landscape painter and lithographer Ellen Tornquist, and the painter Caroline Kempter.

She also took private lessons from various Munich-based artists, including the landscape and portrait painter Heinrich Rettig, the genre and portrait painter Georg Sauter, and the painter, draughtsman and illustrator Adolf Münzer. She also attended summer courses at the Dachau School of Painting with Ludwig Dill.

During her studies, she tried to secure her academy fees and livelihood by selling her paintings and individual commissioned works. Ida Paulin participated in numerous exhibitions, such as those of the Württemberg and Palatinate Art Associations and the Munich and Augsburg Art Associations. In 1912, her decorative arts works were added to the list. While the critiques of her paintings ranged from enthusiastic to scathing, her decorative arts creations received consistently positive reviews.

The portraits she created show a pastose and powerful painting style. With sure brushstrokes, she painted empathetic compositions, whose poignancy is reminiscent of Leo Putz and the Post-Impressionist painting of the artists' association "Die Scholle". Her landscapes are determined by an "unbound joy of colour" (1924), evoking a magical fairy-tale mood, especially in "Märchenwald".

The trend of cobalt blue coloured glasses spread from Bohemia to the Bavarian Forest in the late 1910s and early 1920s. A well-known Bohemian producer was Ludwig Moser & Sons in Karlovy Vary. He developed a new form of decoration for this type of glass, which he had protected copyrighted under the term "oroplastique" in 1919. "Oroplastic decorations" are patterns and ornaments that were etched with hydrofluoric acid and then gilded with a matte finish.

After this, the raised surfaces were polished, creating a beautiful contrast between the base and the raised reliefs. Ida Paulin also designed many cobalt blue vessels – including lidded jars, plates, bottles, vases, a punch bowl, and a candlestick, which she decorated with oroplastic rocaille, laurel leaf, or fruit friezes, or painted with pastose enamel paints.

Founded in Weimar in 1919 by Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus was a style-forming art school that focused on the synthesis of art and craft. The Bauhaus developed into one of the most influential workplaces of avant-garde artists and an important place for the revival and modernization of arts and crafts.

In the various classes of the art school, decorations and designs, which until then had often still been committed to historicism, were revised and simplified to a high level of artisanship and prepared for industrial production. A prime example of the impact of the Bauhaus may be the Bauhaus student and pioneer of industrial design Wilhelm Wagenfeld (1900–1990), who in 1931 designed a fireproof tea service for the “Jenaer Glaswerk Schott” company that is still popular today.

Technical innovations enabled and boosted modes of decoration such as airbrush painting, which was used above all in Art Deco art. The elastic stencils required for the painting process were developed in Bunzlau in the 1920s and used to decorate ceramics, but also glass.

In 1929, Ida Paulin designed a modern service called "Rainbow" for the Swiss chocolate manufacturer Sprüngli, decorated with a six-colour striped décor. Circumferential, concentric line decorations such as these were very popular at the time. They were also experimented with at the State Technical School for the Glass Industry in Zwiesel. Paulin used a striped pattern based on the "Rainbow" decoration for Wagenfeld's tea service – one of these sets has survived in private hands.

When Japan opened up to the West in the mid-19th century, Europe became acquainted with the foreign art of this country. As early as 1862, there was a first presentation of Far Eastern works of art at the World's Fair in London. The first comprehensive exhibition of Japanese art in Germany took place in Munich in 1909.

Japanese woodblock prints in particular, with their unfamiliar composition and design characterized by two-dimensionality, perspectives and emphasized contours, met with an enormous response. They became a source of inspiration for modern art.

Ida Paulin's work as well was influenced by Far Eastern prints in terms of design and motifs. Her depictions of nature, for example, sometimes show fragmentary images of stylized birds, fish, insects, and plants such as branches with cherry blossoms. This also includes the motif of the spider sitting in a radial web, which runs through Ida Paulin's glass oeuvre and can be found on vases, jars, plates, and especially drinking glasses. The spider's web also appears on an early batik blanket, framed by six fairy-like creatures reclining in a forest meadow.

With her reception of Chinese art, Ida Paulin also embraced the new wave of enthusiasm for Chinoiserie that spread through Germany in the 1920s. Among these works, designs for plates showing landscapes with figurative staffage have survived, while the shape and colour of a lidded glass bowl is reminiscent of Chinese pagodas.

In the 1920s, Ida Paulin developed decorations of small stylized tendrils and blossoms, which surround the vessels like a net. For these, she used unusual glass forms such as carafes with bent or multiple beaded walls, and craquelé or iridescent glass.

The design repertoire of this period includes scattered star patterns, often in combination with dots and tickmarks in monochrome or extremely contrasting colours, which appear primarily as decorations for liqueur services. Stylized natural forms are also frequently found, abstracted to the point of pictorial symbols. They cover the glasses rhythmically structured or in loose formation.

Sparingly used pictorial symbols also form the decoration of a lidded goblet for which Ida Paulin was awarded the silver medal at the 1937 Paris World's Fair. It is a rather classical work in restrained colours, balanced in form and decoration, but lacking the originality of earlier works.

Since the beginning of the 20th century, there had been various reform movements to raise the quality of craft. In the course of these reforms, embroidery gained a new appreciation and found its way into the decorative arts.

One of the pioneers of a new direction of the traditionally female connoted art of needlework was the Dada artist Hanna Höch. She published her ideas in the form of needlework patterns in illustrated embroidery magazines between 1916 and 1926. She declared embroidery to be an avant-garde means of artistic expression, pointing out the close connection between painting and embroidery.

Ida Paulin's wide-ranging decorative arts oeuvre also included embroidery. Early pieces include small-format utilitarian embroideries such as tapestries, pillowcases, or tray inlays with traditional floral or Art Nouveau motifs. The reorientation of embroidery in the sense of "needle painting" inspired the artist: She created embroidered blankets of black fabric, encircled by wide borders of brightly coloured yarns that contrasted strongly with the black centre field. Over time, the motifs became more abstract, and floral and figurative patterns receded in favour of an expressive visual language.

Since the last quarter of the 19th century, batik textiles from Indonesia had reached Europe via the Dutch colonies. In 1906, a "Dutch-Indian Art Exhibition" was shown at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Museum, Krefeld. It was the first major exhibition of batiks in Germany, which made these exotic textiles known to a wider public.

In the traditional art of Indonesian batik, the pattern is drawn on the fabric background with liquid wax flowing from the so-called tjanting, a spoon-like ladle. During the subsequent dyeing process, the fabric sections covered with wax do not absorb any color and stand out as a white pattern from the dyed background.

For multi-coloured patterns, this process is repeated. However, handling the tjanting requires skill and practice. The batik pen, which was developed in 1911 and which worked similarly to a fountain pen, meant a significant simplification of the process.

This new technique, whose strange motifs and intense colours aroused enthusiasm, quickly found its way into the arts and crafts scene. Each print was unique, which suited the craft-oriented production of the applied arts. Batiks were used for piano and table covers, cushion covers, clothing, lampshades, ties and much more.

Ida Paulin was fascinated by this novel artistic medium that combined painting with craftsmanship and allowed for an interesting expansion of painterly expression.

The term "Golden Twenties" is used to describe the period between 1923 and 1929 – the time between the end of the hyperinflation and the beginning of the Great Depression. It was a decade marked by strong social and cultural upheavals. The political reality of the Weimar Republic was masked by a shiny golden illusory world in which only a fraction of the population had a share.

Actually, the twenties were the decade of women. They had had to take over men's tasks during the First World War and thus developed independence and self-confidence. They freed themselves from corsets and long skirts and pants in the style of Marlene Dietrich, jackets, ties and bob cuts became fashionable. Short dresses with spaghetti straps, flamboyant jewellery and the consumption of cigarettes also characterized the appearance.

Cinema, vaudeville, revues, operettas and music imported from America such as jazz and swing became a major part of the evening entertainment in the cities. American and African-American dances were enthusiastically received in the 1920s and revolutionized dancing in Germany. The first performance of the dancer Josephine Baker in the "Revue Nègre" in Paris in October 1925 heralded the Charleston years.

The decoration of Ida Paulin’s glasses mirrors the spirit of that time. Marlene Dietrich, Josephine Baker, dancers, jazz musicians, couples in evening dress at the dance or at the bar are popular motifs. Women in sports clothes or swimming suits, shown hiking, skiing or strolling with girlfriends are also recurring subjects.

Among the painted glasses by Ida Paulin, representations of children, animals and fairy tales occupy a large space.
Children constituted a popular motif especially for juice jugs and mugs. They are shown busy with games and sports, flying kites, sledding, rocking on swings, watering flowers or with baskets full of garden fruits. Dwarfs or winged elves assist them and butterflies accompany them while gardening.

But these are not the only delicate creatures to populate the glasses: sparrows, doves and exotic birds are also popular motifs. Humorous depictions, such as the raven wearing glasses and hiking boots, or bees collecting honey with parasol and bucket, correspond to a childlike world of imagination. This is also evident in scenic depictions, which have only been preserved in the form of sketches: the beetle family goes on an excursion, elves ride through the air on crickets, or a cricket serenades the adored snail lady with a violin.

The depictions from "Snow White", "Sleeping Beauty", "Hansel and Gretel" or "Cinderella", which often appear as a sequence of scenes, are also fairy-tale-like. They decorate flasks, bowls and plates as well as a cocoa service made of Jena glass. While the children and animal motifs are kept in cheerful colours, the artist chose a palette of red, black, gold and muted white tones for the fairy tale motifs.

Recurring motifs in the artist's work are flowers and blossoms, which can be found on all types of glass vessels. Ida Paulin was inspired by the diversity of the local flora. In addition to colourful bouquets of blossoms, there are floral compositions that appear to have been plucked from farmhouse gardens that surround the bodies of the vessels as two-dimensional decorations. Typical mountain flowers like gentian or edelweiss accompany figurative scenes, such as depictions of Bavarian village life. In general, flowers and blossoms often appear as a decorative filler in scenic representations.

The motif of the "Friedrichians", as Ida Paulin herself called them, is based on representations of Prussian soldiers from the 18th century. The often freely interpreted uniforms express a romantic understanding of history, which is founded in the wave of veneration for Frederick the Great in the 1920s. The numerous depictions of traditional costumes, including couples wearing Alsatian as well as Black Forest garb, also embody the search for historical roots and tradition. Likewise, the Biedermeier couples and scenes increasingly used in the 1930s are evidence of a retrospective view that did not contend with the National Socialist worldview of that time.

During the period of National Socialism, Ida Paulin's repertoire of motifs proved to be much more harmless and conformist. Progressive themes, such as jazz combos with black musicians and constructivist abstractions were absent from then on. However, Paulin's success was unbroken, as evidenced by her participation in numerous exhibitions, fairs, and sales events.

The Leipzig Fair, which took place twice a year, played an important role in Ida Paulin's artistic work, as it allowed her to present prototypes of her decorative arts to a potential clientele. The international nature of the fair and the personal contact with entrepreneurs opened up a wide range of sales opportunities.

Her commissions included souvenir glasses, for instance with views of Malcesine on Lake Garda painted in delicate black stain. For Augsburg she chose well-known monuments, for the North Sea island of Helgoland all kinds of sea creatures and for the Brocken Hotel in the Harz Mountains a witch riding on a billy goat as well as a devil. Bremen was represented by the city key and the Bremen Town Musicians.

A novelty were painted glasses, which were ordered by companies as promotional gifts and decorated with company names and company-specific motifs. For the Pfaff sewing machine factory in Kaiserslautern, Ida Paulin developed a glass series with depictions of happy sewing machine owners. She illustrated the worldwide distribution of this product in the form of sewing machine scenes in exotic settings, reaching from Europe to Asia, from Greenland to South America.

The Stein-Tobler company in Union City (USA), a leader in embroidery and lace production, commissioned her to create a glass collection and supplied in-house lace borders as a pattern. Ida Paulin designed small scenic representations, whose figurines she outfitted with lace skirts and lace-trimmed dresses. She also designed a drinking set for the radio manufacturer SABA, using an advertising poster showing a childlike couple in traditional Black Forest costume as a motif.

Arnold Haag studied at the Munich Art Academy from 1903 to 1912 and was a master student of Franz von Stuck.

In the course of his studies, he created numerous graphic works, including illustrations for the Künstler-Sänger-Verein in Munich, the avant-garde art magazine "Jugend – Münchner illustrierte Wochenschrift für Kunst und Leben" and for "Licht und Schatten – Wochenschrift für Schwarz-Weiß-Kunst und Dichtung". He also created book illustrations during this period.

During his work as an art teacher in the rural educational home Schloss Bieberstein in Hesse, he increasingly turned to outdoor painting and became a member of the painter colonies Willingshausen and Kleinsassen.

When he met Ida Paulin, whom he knew from earlier times, again in 1923, they both decided to open a glass art workshop in the "Künstlerhof" in Augsburg. In order to acquire basic knowledge of glass painting, he attended the glass school in Zwiesel in the Bavarian Forest, which was run by Bruno Mauder, in 1924. In the same year he married Ida Paulin and moved to Augsburg. In the following years, he produced commissioned works for the city of Augsburg, including glass windows for the cemetery chapel in Augsburg-Haunstetten, for the Hammerschmiedeschule and the Canisiuskirche.

In addition to his major projects, he had a share in the designs for his wife's stained glass works. Views of cities, castles and churches as well as figurative depictions reveal his influence. Glass objects with his signature are not known, however, occasionally the double signature "AIPH" occurs.

1883
January 19, 1883 born in Nuremberg, Germany, the son of Frederik Haag, an entrepreneur from the United States (hence he received both German and American citizenship), and Ella Haag, née Prohaska, an actress.

Realgymnasium Nuremberg

Kunstgewerbeschule Nuremberg

1903–1912

Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, master student under Franz von Stuck

1904

Courses at the "Schule für zeichnende Künste und Malerei" of Moritz Heymann, Munich

1906–1912

Painting courses in the painter colony Dachau. Painting courses in Holzhausen, Ammersee

1908 (?)

Scholarship for a study trip to Venice

1912–1924    

Art teacher at Lietz'sches Landerziehungsheim at Schloss Bieberstein, Hesse

1924       

Marriage to the artist Ida Paulin and move to Augsburg
Instruction in glass painting by Bruno Mauder, glass school Zwiesel

1926

Studio in the "Künstlerhof", Augsburg

1925–36

Teaching activity: painting and drawing courses in Augsburg

1936

Accident at glass firing furnace, permanent health impairment

1944

Studio and residence in Augsburg destroyed in Word War II

1945

Move to the family of his brother-in-law in Bad Münster am Stein, Rhineland-Palatinate

1949

Dies in Bad Münster am Stein on June 2, 1949

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Imprint:
City of Augsburg
Kunstsammlungen & Museen Augsburg
Director: Dr. Christof Trepesch
Strategic Communication: Monika Harrer-Jalsovec M.A.
Curator of the exhibition: Dr. Christof Trepesch, Sarah Klein M.A.
Research Assistent: Dr. Angela Nestler-Zapp
Educational programs: Team Kunst- und Kulturvermittlung
Exhibition graphics: Kerstin Kriegbaum
Editor: Simone Eitzenberger M.A.
Picture credits: Kunstsammlungen & Museen Augsburg and as indicated.