DesignerAustrian
Carl Auböck
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Carl Auböck II was born on 25 August 1900 in Vienna, the son of Carl Auböck I, a goldsmith who had founded the family's Werkstätte in 1906 at Bernardgasse in the Neubau district. The elder Auböck had built a business around Wiener Bronzen - small decorative bronze figures that were fashionable collectibles in early twentieth-century Austria. The son was apprenticed to the workshop as a teenager, learning engraving and metalwork from the bench up, while also attending the School of Graphic Design until 1917.
In 1918, before the Bauhaus had officially opened, Auböck enrolled in Johannes Itten's private art school in Vienna. When Itten accepted his appointment as one of the founding masters at the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1919, Auböck followed, becoming one of very few Viennese students to attend. He also studied drawing and painting at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, an unusual combination of craft apprenticeship, avant-garde pedagogy, and fine art training that shaped his entire outlook. The Bauhaus emphasis on integrating materials and ideas - rejecting the hierarchy that placed fine art above applied design - gave him a framework for what the Werkstätte could become.
He returned to Vienna around 1923 to care for his ailing father and took over direction of the workshop. What followed was a systematic reimagining of what a domestic object could be. Working predominantly in brass but moving freely into leather, wood, horn, ceramic, and glass, Auböck designed objects that were functional, formally precise, and often quietly strange: paperweights shaped like human hands and feet, corkscrews with walnut handles, letter openers in the form of keys, bookends with the proportions of small sculptures. Each piece was made by hand in the townhouse workshop, stamped with the Auböck mark. The vocabulary was modernist but the sensibility was more personal - there was wit in the scale choices, in covering whiskey glasses with fur or wrapping clock faces in leather.
By the 1950s, working alongside his son Carl Auböck III (born 1924), the workshop entered its most productive phase, ultimately generating more than 4,000 distinct designs. In 1954, four gold medals at the X Milan Triennale confirmed his international standing; the award was for metalware design. He also designed a coat hanger for Illums Bolighus in Denmark, a collaboraton that connected the Viennese workshop to the Scandinavian retail design world. Auböck died on 17 July 1957 in Vienna, before the full wave of international recognition reached him. The workshop passed to Carl Auböck III, then to the fourth generation - Carl Auböck IV and his sister Maria Auböck, both architects - who continue operations at the original Bernardgasse address.
On the auction market, Auböck II's work appears across European and American design sales. On Auctionist, 53 lots are recorded, with 3 currently active. The majority of Nordic market activity runs through Palsgaard Kunstauktioner in Denmark (33 lots) and Quittenbaum Kunstauktionen in Munich (3 lots). Top prices in the Nordic market include 8,627 SEK for a brass newspaper rack and 7,214 SEK for a pair of brass bookends (model 3808). At international design-specialist houses, a magazine rack (model 4488, c. 1950, leather and brass) achieved $3,528 at Wright Auctions in April 2024, and a set of three brass paperweights sold for $3,276 at Los Angeles Modern Auctions in April 2023. The market for Auböck objects is active at the middle tier of the design auction world, with strong interest at American houses that specialize in mid-century design. His work continues to be produced by the current Werkstätte, which distinguishes vintage pieces - identified by model numbers and period marks - from contemporary reissues.