Karl Klaus

Karl Klaus belongs to that company of designers whom a single commission made and whom the archives then almost entirely lost. He was born in 1889 — where is not recorded in the standard references — and from the school year 1907/08 until 1911 he studied at the Vienna Kunstgewerbeschule in the class of Josef Hoffmann, in the very years when Hoffmann’s circle was realizing the Palais Stoclet in Brussels and Klimt’s Tree of Life was taking shape for its dining room. He styled himself architect: the printed designer’s mark on a Serapis vase now in the Kirkland Museum in Denver reads "Nach Entwurf von Karl Klaus, Architekt, Wien" — after a design by Karl Klaus, architect, Vienna — and the caption beneath his work in the German art press of 1911 calls him "Arch. Karl Klaus-Wien." In 1911, the year he left Hoffmann’s classroom, he is recorded as joining the Wiener Werkstätte itself.

That same year his name became inseparable from a single enterprise. Ernst Wahliss, the Viennese porcelain house with its showroom on the Kärntnerstrasse and its factory — the Alexandra Porcelain Works — at Turn-Teplitz in Bohemia, had built its fortune on historicism: in 1894 the firm had acquired the Stellmacher factory and hundreds of old models of the Imperial Vienna manufactory, closed since 1864, which it reproduced as luxury "Alt-Wien" porcelain. Around 1910, in the account published by Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, the aging firm placed its considerable technical means at the service of the new art "at the urging of two artists, Karl Klaus and Charles Gallé" — the second name a genuine puzzle of the Serapis literature, appearing in period print and in auction records yet attached to no documented biography. The house chemists broke faience’s traditional three-color limit of blue, green, and reddish yellow, enriching the palette with black, violet, carmine, yellow, silver, and gold; the first trials were painted on existing forms, and Wahliss then commissioned new forms from Klaus himself. The result, christened Serapis-Fayence and launched in 1911, was shown that year at the Turin International Exposition, noticed in The Studio in London, and published at length in Darmstadt — a light faience body under white craquelure glaze, carrying enamel ornament of a density and discipline that translated the Werkstätte’s drawn line into serial ceramic production. The trade literature has long suggested, plausibly but without documentation, that Klaus served the firm as artistic director.

His Serapis work runs in two registers. The first is ornament: vases, clocks, jardinières, and wall plates on which flowers, trees, and arabesques are locked into geometric fields — work whose scrollwork shows, as has been observed, a kinship with Carl Otto Czeschka among the Werkstätte’s designers. The second is figures, modeled in collaboration with the sculptor Franz Staudigl: a Salome of 1912, fairy-tale princes and princesses, opera subjects — the Serapis line’s answer to the Viennese figurine tradition. Dated works carry his activity to about 1915; thereafter the trail thins to nothing. The Metropolitan Museum of Art gives his dates as 1889–1925; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, more cautiously, as 1889–after 1925; no death place, late career, or portrait photograph has entered the literature. The Wahliss firm itself declined after the war and closed by the end of the 1920s. What survives of Karl Klaus is, almost exclusively, Serapis — and on the strength of it his work has entered the Metropolitan, LACMA, and the Kirkland Museum.

Animals are rare in that surviving work — and that rarity is precisely the Bestiaire’s claim on him. The 1911 article records swallows and blackbirds as accents on the clocks and vases, but in the published corpus of Serapis-Fayence only one composition makes the animal its governing subject: the pair of wall plates of form 537, the tree filled with birds (decor II.9603) and the three parrots (decor II.9605), both in this collection, the parrot plate reproduced full-page in the founding article and its colors inventoried in the text — "green, light blue, light green, blue, red and gold." Until the documented corpus proves otherwise, these two plates appear to constitute the animal chapter of Serapis production nearly entire. Set beside the French holdings of the Bestiaire, Klaus marks the collection’s opposite pole: where the potters of Paris and the Puisaye pursued the animal through matière — glaze, flame, and accident — Klaus pursued it through the drawn line, executed to the millimeter by an industrial house. His birds do not emerge from the kiln; they are composed, as a façade is composed. He is the Bestiaire’s purest case of the designer’s animal — and, flanking a Klimt in this collection as his teacher’s circle once flanked an embrace with trees of life at the Palais Stoclet, his two plates restate in faience the grammar he learned in Hoffmann’s classroom while that grammar was being invented.