When the Backhausen company closed in 2023, more than seventeen decades after its founding in 1849, the Austrian textile manufacturer left behind an archive that charts both changing European tastes and the shifting profession of textile design. Eleven thousand entries include carpets, upholstery fabrics, and curtains from the ornate style of historicism prevalent in the late 1800s, through the influential turn-of-the-century Vienna Secessionists, and into the interwar years of art deco. Now on permanent loan to the Leopold Museum in Vienna, the remarkable collection includes graphic designs by over three hundred designers, as well as swatches, sample books, and collection catalogues. Six Backhausen design books are the already-rich archive’s “jewels.” Covering the years 1890 to 1965, they include detailed descriptions of individual fabrics, including their designers, technical specifications, and for many entries, the name of client or person who commissioned the work.
Dr. Louise Kiesling is responsible for the survival of the Backhausen Archive today. An heir of the Porsche-Piëch automotive fortunes, she acquired what had by then become the ailing Backhausen company in 2014 and ensured the preservation of its vast archive before her death in 2022. The Leopold Museum’s Poetry of the Ornament ran through March 2025 and drew from this extensive material to form 245 exhibits, starting with one of the earliest surviving Backhausen designs, an ornate floral pattern from 1878. The exhibition concluded with the re-released Design 6643 by Josef Hoffmann. An exemplar of the Jungendstil movement, which translates as “Young Style,” the design was first produced in 1907 and reproduced in 1961, decades before the style enjoyed a second surge in popularity in the 1980s.
Organized chronologically, the exhibition marched from the historicism subsequently derided as “cluttered” towards clean geometric and abstract designs. Along the way, textile samples, designs on paper, and photography of textiles applied to interiors followed a remarkable cache of European design icons. Work on display included Koloman Moser’s rolling, swirling patterns, Otto Prutscher’s delicate teardrop geometries, and My Ullmann’s exuberant florals. Several fascinating anomalies also made an appearance amidst the historical material. The geometric faces of Fritz Dietl’s tricolor Design 4432, for example, seem to stare out from the 1960s but were created in 1902.
During its years of operation, the Backhausen company engaged with an astonishing range of designers and fabric manufacturers, “a diverse transnational network” fostered by the travel and study abroad of family associated with the company. From 1900, Backhausen also engaged with contemporary artists, including the Vienna Secessionists Hoffmann and Moser, who founded the celebrated Wiener Werkstätte with Fritz Waerndorfer in 1903. Hoffmann and Moser also taught at the Kunstgewerbeschule, the School of Arts and Crafts in Vienna, and introduced many students, including Dietl, to design work for Backhausen. I lingered over these facts, marveling at the thinking-on-paper visible in these designs and pondering the legacy of the often materially impoverished design education today.
The Archive also captures the changing methods of textile design and production. As early as 1853, when Karl Backhausen left the business, his brother changed the company name to include the new weaving technique: chenille. At the time, Backhausen held sole patent for chenille production in Austria and France. Despite its enviable position in nineteenth and early twentieth century, the company was far from impervious to history. Backhausen struggled to recover from the Wall Street crash of 1929, later recuperating by adapting to war production. “[T]ent tarps, blankets, and flags were now made on the machines that had once woven fabrics bearing the most impressive designs of Viennese Modernism,” the exhibition catalogue explains. In the 1960s, the company—ahead of the times once again—began releasing reproductions of their original Jugendstil designs.
Over time, however, the company took another downward turn, and while Kiesling’s acquisition resulted in restructuring, its fortunes could not be turned around. Nevertheless, resilience, the byword of today, appears between the lines of the company’s storied history—now surviving in the preservation of the Backhausen Archive.
Jessica Hemmings writes about textiles. She is a professor of craft at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and professor II at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Norway.
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