Jacob & Josef Kohn

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Jacob & Josef Kohn

logo
legal form Corporation
founding 1849
Seat Vienna I, Elisabethstrasse 24
management Kohn family
Number of employees 6300 (status: 1900)
Branch Furniture production

Jacob and Josef Kohn
Felix Kohn
Advertisement by Jacob & Josef Kohn (1898)
Anteroom of the Cabaret Fledermaus with the seating group designed by Josef Hoffmann and Gustav Siegel
The "Sitzmaschine" was manufactured by Jacob & Josef Kohn based on a design by Josef Hoffmann
Chair from the production of Jacob & Josef Kohn

Jacob & Josef Kohn , or J. & J. Kohn for short , was a furniture and interior design company in Austria-Hungary . The extended name of the Kohn company was Erste Österreichische Aktiengesellschaft for the production of furniture from bent wood. Vienna or stock corporation for the production of Viennese furniture. Novo Radomsk .

history

In 1849 the Jewish entrepreneur Jacob Kohn (1791–1866) and his son Josef (1814–1884) founded a factory for the production of wooden components in Vsetín , Moravia . In 1867, Kohn received a privilege to improve the method of bending long timber. Just one year later, in 1868, the bentwood factory established in Vsetín started production. The following year a second production facility was built in Jičín , Bohemia . Further factories followed in 1871 in Cracow and Teschen , in 1884 in Novo-Radomsk , Russia , and a frame factory in Holešov in 1890. In 1900 the company employed 6,300 workers with a daily production of 5,500 pieces of furniture.

Jacob & Josef Kohn was appointed purveyor to the Spanish court ( Proveedor de la Real Casa ).

In 1893 there were 51 bentwood production facilities worldwide. Kohn met the increasing competition with technical innovations, such as the development of new furniture details and production processes, as well as the constant expansion of its product range. Not only cafes, but also living rooms were furnished with bentwood. After establishing his frame factory, Kohn was able to deliver complete interior fittings.

Josef Kohn was guided by the tastes of better-off clients, but for a long time he had no qualified designers for salon furniture. At the Paris World Exhibition in 1900 , he was able to present models for the first time that were designed by Gustav Siegel (1880–1970), an artistic collaborator at the Wiener Werkstätte and a student of Josef Hoffmann . Gustav Siegel then became chief designer of the Kohn company and was responsible for most of the designs. From then on, bentwood furniture was no longer an anonymous industrial product for the mass market , but became a part of the Arts and Crafts Movement and product design . In 1901 Jacob & Josef Kohn were given the honor of designing the Hall of Honor for the Austrian Exhibition in Glasgow .

After the death of the founder Josef Kohn on September 17, 1884, the company was continued by his widow Rosa and their sons Carl, Julius, Felix and Johann Kohn. The eldest of the four brothers, Carl, retired into private life in 1895.

Own sales outlets existed in Antwerp , Barcelona , Berlin , Budapest , Hamburg , Cologne , London , Madrid , Marseille , Milan , Moscow , Naples , Nuremberg , Paris , Rome , St. Petersburg and Warsaw and other representations and agencies in all the major commercial empires. The company's products were awarded 36 first medals and diplomas at almost all exhibitions before 1900. The owners received the highest recognition from the emperor on the occasion of the Paris exhibition in 1878, and they were honored with commandeur, officer and knight crosses of Austrian, Spanish, Belgian, German and Russian medals.

The furniture factory in Teschen was honored with visits from Crown Prince Rudolf , Archduke Albrecht , Rainer and Friedrich and also from Emperor Franz Joseph I.

Notable welfare institutions in the factories gave evidence of the care devoted to workers. There was an invalidity and pension fund, day nurseries , savings and advance payment institutes, drawing and modeling schools, regular general Christmas presents , etc.

In addition to Josef Hoffmann, architects such as Otto Wagner , Adolf Loos , Koloman Moser or Otto Prutscher designed products from the Kohn company, which led to great success at the Cologne Werkbund exhibition in 1914.

The cooperation with Josef Hoffmann promoted the reputation and success of the Kohn company. Hoffmann supplied designs such as the “Sitzmaschine” from 1904 and chairs for the Viennese cabaret Fledermaus 1907. Hoffmann equipped the Purkersdorf sanatorium with dining room chairs made of laminated beech with circular decorations, which he had made by Jacob & Josef Kohn. In return, Hoffmann and Koloman Moser designed a shop for the Kohn company in Berlin at Leipziger Strasse 40 in 1906. For the 1908 art show in Vienna, he designed a small country house with interior furnishings on behalf of Kohn. Otto Wagner had the chairs for the dispatch office of the newspaper “ Die Zeit ” manufactured by Kohn.

With the help of upholstery fabrics from the Backhausen company , the artists created seating furniture that was of extraordinary value for the time. Jacob & Josef Kohn became a leading company in the field of furniture production and, together with the Wiener Werkstätte, founded a discipline that years later was referred to as " industrial design ".

The success and importance of the Kohn company was underscored by participation in a large number of exhibitions at home and abroad and the awards presented there: Centennial Exhibition 1876 ​​in Philadelphia ; World Exhibition Paris 1878 (distinction); 1885 Antwerp ; Exposició Universal de Barcelona (1888) ; All-Russian Industry and Craft Exhibition 1896 ; World Exhibition Paris 1900 (distinction); 1901 Glasgow; 1901/02 Austrian Museum for Art and Industry ; 1902 Turin ; Louisiana Purchase Exposition 1904 in St. Louis ; 1906 Milan , London , Bucharest ; 1908 Vienna Art Show ; 1910 Buenos Aires (distinction) and 1914 the Cologne Werkbund exhibition. The exhibitions in 1876 showed the will to bent wood in architectural form.

In 1914, J. & J. Kohn merged with Mundus AG (Kohn-Mundus), which in turn was incorporated into the Thonet brothers in 1922 (Thonet-Kohn-Mundus). The Kohn brand lasted until 1937. Furniture by Jacob & Josef Kohn can now be found in museums such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York or the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. The Museum of Applied Arts, MAK Vienna has a large furniture collection and shows in its permanent exhibition an overview of a hundred years of history of the competitor Gebrüder Thonet as well as products from the Kohn brothers and the Danhauser furniture factory .

The motto of the Jacob & Josef Kohn company was "Semper sursum", "Always upwards". The company headquarters was in Vienna's Innere Stadt , Elisabethstrasse  24, the “main defeat”, i.e. the central sales location, was in the inner city at Burgring  3.

literature

  • Stefan Üner: Jacob & Josef Kohn, in: Wagner, Hoffmann, Loos and the furniture design of Viennese modernism. Artist, client, producer , ed. v. Eva B. Ottillinger, exhib. Kat. Hofmobiliendepot, Vienna March 20 - October 7, 2018, pp. 140–142, ISBN 978-3-205-20786-3 .
  • Baletka Ladislav: History a současnost podnikání na Vsetínsku, Valašskomeziříčsku a Rožnovsku. Žehušice 2007, ISBN 978-80-86699-48-6 (Czech).
  • Judith Miller: Furniture. The great encyclopedia . Dorling Kindersley, Starnberg 2006, ISBN 3-8310-0947-3 (English: Furniture .).
  • Jiri Uhlir: From Viennese chair to architectural furniture: Jacob & Josef Kohn, Thonet and Mundus. Bentwood furniture from Secessionism to interwar modernism . Böhlau, Vienna 2009, ISBN 3-205-78375-1 .
  • Jacob & Josef Kohn. Memorandum of the firm Jacob & Josef Kohn, Wsetin, (Austria, Moravia) for the centennial exhibition in Philadelphia 1876. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Museum Library. [NK2545 .K64m PDF].
  • Julio Vives Chillida, Jacob & Josef Kohn. Una mirada desde Barcelona. La casa de muebles Kohn en la Exposición Universal de Barcelona de 1888: madera curvada, historicismo y modernismo , Barcelona, ​​Editorial La Plana, 2006, ISBN 978-84-934664-8-0 . (Spanish).
  • Julio Vives Chillida, Josef Hoffmann y Jacob & Josef Kohn en la Kunstschau Wien de 1908. La pequeña casa de campo: una efímera obra de arte total , 2008 Editorial Lulu.com (print on demand), ISBN 978-1-4092-0239 -4 .
  • Genrih Gatsura, Jacob & Josef Kohn Furniture. J & J Kohn on the Furniture market of Imperial Russia 2008, ISBN 5-7071-0372-4 (Russian).
  • Kohn, Josef. In: Austrian Biographical Lexicon 1815–1950 (ÖBL). Volume 4, Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna 1969, p. 66.

Web links

Commons : Jacob & Josef Kohn  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d See the biography of Jacob & Josef Kohn on the Voglhofer company website.
  2. ^ Official Journal of the Wiener Zeitung , no. 288, Friday December 6, 1867
  3. ↑ Factura: Jacob y Josef Kohn, Fábrica de Muebles. Todocoleccion, June 2, 1892, accessed January 30, 2011 (Spanish).
  4. ↑ a b c d Jacob & Josef Kohn . In: Presented by the industrialists of Austria under the high protectorate of His K. and K. Highness of the Most Serene Archduke Franz Ferdinand (Hrsg.): Die Groß-Industrie Oesterreichs . Festival ceremony for the glorious fiftieth anniversary of the reign of His Majesty the Emperor Franz Josef I. Volume 3 . Leopold Weiss, Vienna 1898, VII. Wood and carved ware industry; Home furnishings, p. 322 .
  5. ↑ See chair based on a design by Otto Prutscher  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.galerie-albertina.at  
  6. ↑ “Sitzmaschine” in the MoMA collection
  7. ↑ See Judith Miller : Möbel. The great encyclopedia. Dorling Kindersley, Starnberg 2006 (original title: Furniture), ISBN 3-8310-0947-3 , p. 376.
  8. ^ Picture of the Kohn company in Berlin, Leipziger Strasse 40
  9. ^ Chair for the dispatch office of the newspaper "Die Zeit" in the collection of the Carnegie Museum of Art
  10. ↑ J. & J. Kohn's cradle in the MoMA collection
  11. ↑ Article  in:  Neue Freie Presse , March 6, 1898, p. 5 (online at ANNO ).Template: ANNO / Maintenance / nfp