Prof. Eduard F. Sekler, Harvard University, 18 June 2002

Leo and Grete Wollner in the USA: Encounters with a New World

“For 1953, the business prospects in architecture and the related fields look good…”, began the American architecture magazine Progressive Architecture in the first issue of its thirty-fourth volume. These words would prove prophetic for the young Wollner couple, for in March 1953 they found themselves in Detroit, Michigan, to receive the equivalent of 35,000 Austrian schillings: in an international competition for modern carpet designs, their submissions had been awarded first and second prize as well as an honourable mention among 1,200 entries from 39 countries.

To understand how the undoubtedly strong artistic talent of the designers could receive such impressive recognition, one must try to transport oneself back into the atmosphere of the place and time in which it occurred. This is probably easier for the author of these lines, as he himself visited Detroit as a young architect in 1954 to see Eero Saarinen’s General Motors Technical Center — a building that Leo and Grete Wollner had also viewed a year earlier.

The buildings of this centre, with their cubic, closed volumes reminiscent of Mies van der Rohe’s IIT (Illinois Institute of Technology) structures and enlivened by brightly coloured primary-coloured side façades, marked their architect as a convinced representative of the avant-garde of the “New Building” movement. His voice must therefore have carried special weight in the jury of the carpet competition, as did that of his friend and occasional partner Charles Eames. Eames had secured a leading role in the American avant-garde through his uncompromisingly radical house (also reminiscent of Mies van der Rohe) and numerous original chair and exhibition designs.

These two jurors, who were personally familiar with the ideals of the “New Building” through stays in Europe, clearly recognised in the Wollner designs works that fulfilled the wishes of the organising company, Arthur Fleischmann Carpet Company. The firm wanted to avoid “conventional leaf and floral motifs” because “the faster pace of modern life……demands quieter designs…” (1).

Within the company, Lawrence Fleischmann, the son of the head of the firm, was the true originator of the idea of holding competitions to obtain new carpet designs. Although he had studied engineering and physics, he soon discovered his interest in the visual arts. Later he owned a significant art collection and a respected gallery. He also played an important role at the Detroit Institute of Arts, where he was close friends with the director, Dr. Edgar P. Richardson. As early as 1951 he had initiated the first national competition for new carpet designs there, which attracted 1,200 American entries. (2)

The Detroit Institute of Arts, one of the most important and respected art museums in the United States, also took on the professional organisation of the second, now international competition and the staging of an exhibition of selected entries, together with an in-house catalogue (3) whose cover featured the prize-winning Wollner design. The organisers had placed particular importance on a highly qualified jury. In addition to the two architects already mentioned, it included the director of the Brooklyn Museum, the president of Baker Furniture Inc. (one of the most important American furniture companies), the president of the Carpet Manufacturers Institute, and the editor of Art Digest.

The jurors expressed themselves consistently positively about the outcome of the competition, and Dr. Richardson, as jury chairman, was able to summarise: “One of the acute problems this competition has solved is to find a carpet design……that fits into a contemporary woollen home. A main purpose of the exhibition was to seek new ideas and perhaps find something that indicates a new trend, and this has been most successfully achieved through the generally high standard of the designs.”

The two top prize-winners could hardly have wished for higher praise. Their designs clearly corresponded to the intentions of the organiser and the progressively minded jurors, who were aware that a great deal of persuasive work would still be needed to establish the ideals of the “New Building” and a matching modern arts and crafts movement among a broader public. Even the reporter for Carpet Review wrote about the competition: “Although many people in the trade and the public will consider the prize-winning designs not particularly aesthetic or beautiful, the jury seems to have been successful in the direction of which (one can say): modern carpet designers will be well advised to work in it.”

It speaks to the youthful entrepreneurial spirit of the two Austrian prize-winners that they used part of their winnings to buy a motorcycle. A three-month trip through part of the USA took them to Chicago, Pittsburgh, and New York. There, just as in Detroit — the centre of automobile manufacturing — they were able to gain impressions of the methods and power of American industrial production. One can imagine what a strong impression the contrast between the American metropoles and occupied Vienna must have made at the time.

In the cities they visited, one could see elegant residential districts alongside severely run-down poor neighbourhoods, sometimes directly next to each other, as well as the particularly impressive pioneering works of skyscraper construction for technically and artistically interested visitors, along with outstanding architectural creations by masters such as Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Mies van der Rohe, and the interiors of leading modern companies such as Knoll International and Herman Miller.

What they saw and mentally processed at the time was probably just as important for Leo and Grete Wollner in its own way as any practical advantages that arose from establishing favourable business connections. After returning home, their artistic, technical, and commercial world was richer for the valuable experiences and insights, and they could feel confirmed in their work. Yet this first victory was only the herald of many further successes that followed in the course of their hardworking lives.

(1) All quotations in the text are taken from Carpet Review, March 1953, p. 25.  

(2) The information about Lawrence Fleischmann comes from an interview he gave in 1970 for the Archives of American Art: http://artarchives.si.edu/oralhist/fleisc70.htm

(3) The author is grateful to the librarian at the Detroit Institute of Arts, Maria Harris, for locating and providing a copy of this unpublished catalogue.

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Historische Darstellung des Wirkens an der Stuttgarter Akademie, der Zusammenarbeit mit der Deutschen Textilindustrie und zeitgenössischen Architekten: Prof. Klaus Lehmann, über seinen Kollegen an der Stuttgarter Akademie: Leo Wollner, die Stuttgarter Akademie und die Pausa in “Stoffe ohne Ende”

Prof. Dr. Jutta Beder, Lexikon der Textildesigner 1950-2000 > Seite 142

The Cora Ginsburg Institute in 2021: : Trapeze, Academie, And Roads Screen-Printed Fabrics Leo and Gretl Wollner pages 14/15 and 16/17

The Cora Ginsburg Institute in 2023: RIVERS and ROADS printed cottons pages 12/13 and 14/15