A TWO-PANEL SCREEN, MID-TWENTY CENTURY

After studying under Josef Hoffmann at the School of Applied Art, Felice Rix-Ueno joined the Wiener Werkstätte in 1917, when she was 24 years old. There she conceived approximately one hundred and twelve designs for textiles, ceramics, glass, wood, and fashion. In 1925 she married Isaburō Ueno, a Japanese architect, who worked in Hoffmann’s studio between 1924 and 1925, and the same year the couple moved back to Japan where she eventually became an influential professor at Kyoto University of Arts. The present lot was most likely created during her time at university, between 1946 and 1963, when she began designing some furniture and experimenting with various mediums. The screen combines clearly her Viennese style and her sensibility for Japanese aesthetic. The delicate decoration recalls a pattern of birds and trees currently in the collections of the MAK museum designed by Rix-Ueno in 1925, however the impressive use of bright colours and the treatment of space and composition shows a much more mature and creative approach and it is emblematic of her considerable imagination. Her work is in held in the collections of the Cooper-Hewitt Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; MAK, Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna and the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.