Margarethe Klimt

Margarethe Klimt , née Margaretha Anna Johanna Hentschel (born December 3, 1892 in Vienna ; † May 7, 1987 there ), was an Austrian fashion designer.

Life

Margarethe Hentschel was one of six children of the government councilor Robert Hentschel and his wife Anna, geb. Pietschmann. She attended Eugenie Schwarzwald's Reformlyceum, where she graduated from high school in 1910; In addition, she received additional painting and drawing lessons during her school days and attended the kuk art embroidery school until 1910. She studied philosophy in Vienna until 1911, then went to London for a year and learned fashion drawing at the County School of Arts and Crafts. She completed an internship at the London fashion salon Ludlow & Cockburn. From 1912 to 1914 she was trained as a tailor by Fritzi Weigl in Vienna, and she also studied interior design with Adolf Loos . Loos was evidently very taken with his pupil; in any case, in 1914 he set up a studio for her at Karl-Schweighofer-Gasse 5. In 1916 Margarethe Hentschel passed the master craftsman's examination and registered both as a clothes maker and a school. The following year she married the estate manager Josef Klimt, with whom she had a daughter and a son. She lived temporarily at Seibersdorf Castle , where her husband worked. The marriage was divorced after a few years, at least after 1921. Margarethe Klimt retained the name of her first husband; when she deregistered in 1926, her business name was "Ms. Klimts Werkstätten".

Fritz Wichert , who directed the Frankfurt School of Applied Arts, entered into negotiations with Margarethe Klimt in the summer of 1926; she should lead a new fashion class to be established. However, problems arose from her Czechoslovak citizenship, which she acquired through her marriage. At the beginning of April 1927 these difficulties were settled and Klimt, who had also requested her own studio in Frankfurt, was able to take up her position with a five-year contract, which was soon followed by another five-year contract. In addition to teaching, she also took care of fashion shows and exhibitions, and traveled regularly to Paris to keep up to date. In 1929 she received the title of professor; In addition, she was able to get a lifelong position and further improvements to her employment contract this year. At this time, Klimt was the only female member of Heinrich Simon's Friday table .

After the National Socialists came to power , Wichert was relieved of his position as head of the arts and crafts school. Margarethe Klimt was given leave of absence by Wichert's acting successor; Among other things, she was accused of being in contact with the Jewish couple Simon and of having an “un-German” attitude. Her brother Robert, a lawyer, stood up for his sister, as he had done before, and finally managed to get the Lord Mayor Friedrich Krebs to reverse Klimt's leave of absence. This allowed Klimt to advance her career further. She became chairman of the fashion department in the Federation for arts and crafts at the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts in Berlin, and from spring 1934 she also headed the municipal fashion office in Frankfurt.

In November 1936, the city of Frankfurt took over the former residence of the emigrated industrialist Paul Hirsch at Neue Mainzer Strasse 57. As a result, Walter Loeffler was commissioned to convert this classicist building for the fashion department. Loeffler committed suicide in 1938 after he had been accused of earlier dealings with communists. He was no longer allowed to be mentioned in connection with the fashion department, which is why Margarethe Klimt was now officially the initiator and source of ideas for the complex renovation. The inauguration was celebrated on November 19, 1938. In the following years, the fashion office was active in, among other things, many exhibitions and demonstrations at home and abroad; still in 1941 z. B. in Denmark . In that year Margarethe Klimt got a second marriage. Klimt's second husband was the Danish composer and conductor Paul von Klenau , who kept his place of residence in Denmark even after the marriage.

The fashion department's publications from this period are shaped by the ideology of National Socialism; Klimt, who, as a single working mother, did not correspond to the propagated image of women, formulated in these books extremely true to the line. Because the Frankfurt Fashion Office was in competition with the German Fashion Institute in Berlin and the German Master School for Fashion in Munich , in 1935 they considered seeking protection from Emmy Göring . There were fashion drafts for labor service clothes etc. Especially after the beginning of the war, substitute materials had to be used; shoe heels made of Plexiglas were propagated as well as the use of fish leather .

The fashion class now belonged to the Städelschule ; Eduard Gaertner, whom Klimt had brought into this position, headed a separate class for fashion drawing. Her goal was to create a fashion academy with university status in Frankfurt; at the same time she was a member of the board of the competing House of Fashion in Vienna.

Because of her marriage to Klenau, whose first marriage was to Heinrich Simon's sister Anne Marie, Klimt, who at the time of her administration had probably been Prussian citizenship, had to take on Danish citizenship, which is why she initially feared the loss of her civil servant position. But her marriage to Klenau was not counted negatively. Rather, Joseph Goebbels invited her to the Mozart celebrations in Vienna in 1941.

However, the acts of war made Klimt's private and professional life difficult. Her husband had withdrawn to Denmark as early as 1940 and she had to get permission to visit him. There was also a lack of material for the design of other dresses; as early as 1942, Klimt asked for fabrics from looted goods. Air raids in 1943 and 1944 destroyed the school building, the fashion department and Klimt's house. Margarethe Klimt moved back to Vienna in 1943. If she was able to justify this initially with health problems, she did not send any more medical certificates later. The payment of her salary was therefore stopped in May 1945. In December 1945 she traveled on to her husband in Denmark. After he died, she returned to Vienna with his estate in the spring of 1947, where she now wanted to build a house of Austrian fashion. She became artistic director of the fashion department at the economic development institute of the Vienna Chamber of Commerce. In addition, from 1949 to 1959 she led master classes for fashion and for fashion and textile work at the Vienna Academy of Applied Arts. In 1948, however, the city of Frankfurt am Main recognized her as incapacitated, so that from 1951 she was able to receive a civil servant's pension.

She was buried in the Vienna Central Cemetery .

literature

• Ulrike May: Klektiven, Margarethe in the Frankfurter Personenlexikon (as of April 17, 2018, accessed on January 12, 2020)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Klimt, Margarethe on frankfurter-habenlexikon.de with a portrait of Emy Limpert
2. ↑ Jeanine Burnicki: The establishment of the Frankfurt Fashion Office. In: Frankfurt 1933-45. Institute for Urban History , accessed on January 12, 2020 .