ManufacturerAustrian
Werkstätten Hagenauer
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Werkstätte Hagenauer Wien was founded in Vienna in 1898 by Carl Hagenauer (1872-1928), a trained goldsmith who had served his apprenticeship at Würbel & Czokally, one of the city's established silverware producers. Carl set up his workshop at a moment when Viennese demand for decorative metalwork was running high, driven by the construction of the Ringstrasse and a broader culture of bourgeois domestic acquisition. He built the business around small figurines and useful objects, quickly distinguishing himself from competitors by moving away from historicist ornament toward a cleaner, more modern formal vocabulary.
The workshop's second generation gave it its lasting identity. Carl's elder son Karl (1898-1956) became the principal designer of everyday objects and some sculpture, absorbing the influence of the Vienna Secession and the Wiener Werkstätte, and working in a fully formed Art Deco style from the 1920s onward. His younger brother Franz (1906-1986) trained at the Academy of Applied Arts, eventually heading its metalwork and metal design classes, and specialized in more purely sculptural work using sheet metals. Together they shaped a body of work that ranged from functional household items - ashtrays, corkscrews, candlesticks, cigar cutters, bookends, lamp bases - to figurines, group sculptures, hood ornaments for automobiles, and large-scale decorative commissions for public buildings.
The visual language Karl developed was spare and witty. Stylized human figures, athletes, dancers, and animals were rendered in brass, often with chrome or nickel plating, stripped of superfluous detail and reduced to elegant silhouettes and surfaces. The forms show awareness of African and Egyptian art alongside the streamlined modernism of the interwar period. His animals in particular, somewhat reminiscent of work by Wiener Werkstätte designer Dagobert Peche, found a wide domestic and export market, including significant sales to the United States. In 1925 Hagenauer's work was shown at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris, where the workshop received both a bronze and a silver medal.
The workshop operated through most of the twentieth century, closing in 1987 after nearly ninety years of continuous production. Its retail premises on Vienna's Opernring, opened in 1938, survive today as a museum and shop. Since 2014 the MAK (Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna) has acquired large parts of the company's archives through purchases and donations, including designs, models, molds, blanks, and documentary records. A major MAK exhibition, 'Werkstätte Hagenauer: Viennese Metal Art 1898-1987', gave the workshop renewed critical attention and brought its full range before a contemporary public.
On the auction market, the 12 Hagenauer works recorded on Auctionist have all appeared at im Kinsky in Vienna, the auction house that has long been one of the primary market venues for this material and that contributed to the MAK archive project. The top results include 2,800 EUR for a skier figure, 2,200 EUR for a bowl titled 'Golfer', and 1,500 EUR for a display vitrine from the original shop fittings. These figures reflect the workshop's position as a collector's category with an established specialist market, particularly strong in Austria and Germany.