Simply modern?

This refreshing originality is the subject of the Augarten Porcelain Museum’s 2026 annual exhibition. Even to the 21st-century mind, the transition from lavish ornamentation to rational beauty  seems surprisingly radical and modern. But while the years 1800–1830 can hardly be beaten for bright colours, the period was anything but simple and carefree.

Europe was thrown into disarray by Napoleon, whose occupation of Vienna prompted the imperial family to flee and the porcelain manufactory to ship its most valuable pieces down the Danube to Hungary. Economic shortages and uncertainty followed, and a political clamp-down silenced all critical voices. But there was no holding science back from its new inventions, or the arts from their bold bright colours. In contemporary interiors, art shone out as a clear sign of optimistic visions and a longing for individuality and a better world. In all the decorative arts, the smart thing to do was to shun ostentatious luxury, with ‘truth’ and ‘harmony’ as essential ingredients in the taste of the new age.

Fashionable ladies and gentlemen sat on outlandishly designed settees sipping coffee from cups decorated in vibrant complementary colours, or even in the style of their clothing, maybe discussing Goethe’s theory of colours and their effect on human sensibility. ‘Colour blocking’ is nothing new: in the 1820s, for example, the subtle progression underlying stripes of strong colour was named after Iris, messenger of the gods and personification of the rainbow. And Iris also gave her name to a printing technique for paper and textiles that was emulated as an optical illusion on porcelain, applied by the finest of painterly hands.

The imperial porcelain manufactory derived its bold styles of design from an attentive observation of events that occupied the mind of the time: an eclipse of the sun or a volcano erupting with global repercussions, contemporary fashions or ground-breaking technological developments, and pioneering new schools of thought on colour and art.