“They were the polar opposites to the Viennese architectural scene”

The place we’re sitting in right now, at Lerchenfelder Straße 54 in the eighth district, used be an architect’s office in the 1920s. Originally it belonged to the architects Berger and Ziegler who emigrated to Palestine in 1934. It was then taken over by my father’s half-sister, Leopoldine Schrom, whom we used to call “Tante Poldi” (Aunt Poldi). Back in those days, a woman working as an independent architect was a big deal. My Aunt Poldi had started studying architecture at the Technical University in Vienna in 1925. With a group of other young women, she was one of the first who dared take the leap. Around the same time, Friedl Dicker and Franz Singer, both of whom had studied at the Bauhaus, came to Vienna.

They began by doing arts and crafts projects, but after 1925 they started getting their first bigger commissions. The Bauhaus itself only established an architecture department in 1927, so Singer and Dicker didn’t have any formal architectural training. As of 1926/27, they began recruiting students from the Technical University to complete architectural sketches for their own atelier. That included Bruno Pollak, the Hungarian architect Anna Szabó, and then in 1929, my aunt Leopoldine Schrom. In one of her letters, she wrote that Singer’s and Dicker’s work was a “hot mess built on artistic talent” and she wanted to finish her studies as quickly as possible. But as it were, she never graduated and ended up becoming its most senior employee until it closed in 1938. One of her colleagues, by the way, was Bernard Rudofsky who later became world-famous for his publications.

Singer and Dicker started the Fine Arts Workshops in Berlin. They had a broad range of interests, and their group of friends was correspondingly diverse. They were interested in all kinds of subjects – architecture, music, psychoanalysis, politics. While at the Bauhaus, they had received commissions to produce stage designs by Berthold Viertel (an Austrian writer who worked as a director in Berlin and later directed several hits in Hollywood, editor’s note). In these projects, one can already recognise their architectural style which was not so much influenced by the Bauhaus as it was by the Russian constructivists, for which they were harshly criticised.

Singer came from an affluent Viennese family. If you look at the projects he completed from 1925 to 1937, most of his clients were Jewish intellectuals, doctors, analysts and journalists. Numerous contracts came from people directly connected to Singer. In terms of design, Singer and Dicker were the polar opposites to the Viennese art scene. As for their colours and their ideas, they were more radical and dazzling than Josef Frank, for instance. In 1988, I had the chance to speak with Milan Dubrović, the former editor-in-chief of the “Presse”, who had personally known Dicker and Singer. He said something to the effect that if you were modern and progressive, then you would commission Dicker and Singer.

In the beginning Singer and Dicker designed rather opulent, heavy, expressive-expressionistic furnishings. Around 1928/29 their designs became more technical, and they started working with tubular steel. A typical example from this period was the Villa Neumann – a job that involved renovating a multifamily house in the Czech town of Reichenberg which belonged to Franz Neumann, a cousin of Franz Singer’s. Singer/Dicker began by removing several walls to create a more spacious feeling and an open layout. By installing folding doors and foldable sliding doors, they created more flexibility on the top floor. Not only did they use tubular steel for the furniture, but also sugarcane bagasse panels and linoleum – materials which are both highly valued today in terms of environmentally-friendly construction.

Friedrich Achleitner called it the “aesthetic luxury”, to which the clients treated themselves. It was not just about its economical or functional character, it was also an aesthetic principle. And let’s not forget that Singer/Dicker were also interested in social issues as demonstrated by their project for the “Youth at Work” association. Many of the atelier team were involved. My Aunt Poldi went out with others to squalid flats and measured the rooms. Then they designed armchairs, stools, tables and beds which were produced by unemployed young people and given to the needy at no cost. Singer/Dicker also received a great deal of attention for the furnishings they designed for the Montessori preschool at Goethehof in the 22nd district – a working-class district.

Upon returning to Vienna in 1925, Friedl Dicker opened an atelier in the 9th district on Wasserburggasse near the Franz Josef Train Station. Franz Singer joined her there, and that’s where they spent the first four years. After that, they relocated to Schadekgasse in the 6th district. But the division of labour began taking shape from the start – he organised matters and catered to the clients and was responsible for the formal design.

Dicker brought the artistic element to the table, with colours and fabrics. Of course, it’s hard to know what exactly each person contributed to the work. But when I took over the atelier from my Aunt Poldi in 1984 along with part of the Dicker/Singer archive, she said: if you ever decide to devote yourself to this, don’t forget Friedl Dicker because her influence on the atelier team was considerably larger than one would assume. All the publications were produced under Franz Singer’s name, he had photos taken of all his works and claimed the designs as his intellectual property. He never mentioned Dicker – that was the typical fate of women back then.

I don’t think she cared either way. That’s why she often didn’t even sign her works. At the end of the 1980s, I had the chance to talk with friends, relatives and former clients of the atelier. That’s how I came in contact with Edith Kramer, a pioneer of art therapy who had taken drawing lessons from Friedl Dicker as a child. When she signed one of her drawings, Friedl Dicker teased her and said, “Ah, you are famous painter!” So apparently Dicker didn’t attach any value to such things.

It was pure luck because most architects’ estates eventually land in the paper container. When he emigrated, Singer had taken his most important works for his portfolio which later ended up in the Bauhaus-Archiv in Darmstadt via the art trade. But for a long time, hardly anyone paid attention to them because people were fixated on the great men of the Bauhaus, such as Walter Gropius. Furthermore, it was difficult to classify many of the sheets because the source material had remained in Vienna. When the atelier in Vienna was dissolved in 1938, my aunt simply packed up the archived materials and stored them at her own atelier. Only very recently has Katharina Hövelmann (who co-curated the exhibition at the Wien Museum MUSA with Georg Schrom and Andreas Nierhaus, editor’s note) succeeded in meticulously examining both parts as a whole in relation to one another.

With the Bauhaus centennial, a lot of things from the fringe shifted to the fore. We received massive praise for digging up the work for our first exhibition in 1988 at Heiligenkreuzer Hof. But then it faded again from memory. Very few people in Vienna know that Elena Makarova staged a Dicker exhibition at the Yad Vashem Museum in 1992. There was an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt in 1994, and then we put on an extremely successful project: a Friedl Dicker exhibition, commissioned by the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. It opened at the Palais Harrach, a branch of the Kunsthistorisches Museum. The exhibition went on tour and was shown at the Joanneum in Graz, the Egon Schiele Centre in the Czech Republic, the Jewish Museum in Paris, and then onto Stockholm, New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta and four more museums in Japan. So a lot has happened although people haven’t always taken notice in Germany.

Elena Makarova and I have been preparing for such a project for a long time. In 1988 we started the process on a shoestring budget. It means a lot to me to now present the work by Dicker and Singer even more extensively with the latest research findings. We attended the exhibition on Saturday with Sir Norman Foster, and he was thrilled. You can now recognise the art-historical value of the work. Naturally, you could also criticise it for being so “artistic” even though it all happened under the banner of functionality. It was also important to me that Friedl Dicker’s work wasn’t reduced to the time after 1942 when she was imprisoned in the Theresienstadt ghetto and gave drawing and art lessons to the children there. Because apart from this horrible end, there was so much in Dicker’s life that was positive – they had so much fun and vitality. Just imagine after World War I in a time of hunger and misery and the Spanish flu, to go to the Bauhaus to make abstract art! What optimism despite the circumstances! It’s an example we could all certainly follow today.