A guide to the arts and crafts of fin-de-siecle Vienna in all media - from architecture, furniture, ceramics, glass, to silver, fashion, and textiles, bookbinding, toys, painting, and the graphic arts - as well as a survey of the cultural development of this pivotal period.

Jane Kallir's comprehensive work not only charts the rise, flowering and decay of the Wiener Werkstatte, but assesses its extraordinary artistic achievements in every branch of design. In doing so, the author analyzes for the first time the dense web of connections institutional and educational, intellectual and social that enabled the imaginative leaders of the Werkstatte to impress upon the Austrian elite and the world beyond their visual ideals and stylistic idiom. Carl E. Schorske