On Apr 29, 2004, at 20:58, Jane Viking Swanson wrote:
[...] Looks like Venetian Gros Point but it says it's from Austria! And I just saw another
photo of what looked like VGP lace from Vienna. That is not a country that comes up in our lace history chat too often (ever?). Anybody know anything about that?
Don't think "Austria"; think "Austro-Hungarian Empire"... :) Which covered a *big* swath of Europe, and didn't disintegrate until WWI.
The book of plates of Art Nouveau lace that The Lace Guild (UK) re-printed a few years back? "Designs fo Modern Lace"? The original was published in 1902, and the title was "Entwurfe fur moderne Spitze" (I'm skipping all the umlauts). The Introduction says:
'In 1900 a display of lace in the new Art Nouveau style was the highlight of the Austrian arts and crafts section at the at the World Exhibition in Paris. Arthur von Scala, the director of the Austrian Museum for Art and Industry in Vienna, later reported "Museums competed with beautiful women to acquire the delicate, airy lace which -- made in Austria -- was able to hold its own with the best creations of France and Belgium"'.
Etc (there's more to it, but I'm not willing to type it all in)
Austria? Vienna? The author's surname was *Hrdlicka*; as Czech as it ever gets... :)
Austria "fronted" for a lot of culture (not just lace, but literature, music, etc) for which *Austrians* weren't, necessarily, "responsible". In addition to the obvious (Austria and Hungary), the Austro-Hungarian Empire held sway over a part of Poland (Russia and Germany swallowed the rest betwen them) , all of what's now Slovakia and the Czech Republic, most of what used to be Yugoslavia (including the lace-making Slovenia), *and* most of Italy. So, sure, "VGP" was coming out of "Austria"; it just wasn't made in Vienna... :)
Sigh... Sometimes I'm *stunned* to realise (once again; thank goodness my memory fails so often, or I'd be in a daze perpetually <g>) just how much US-Americans can get away with, including supreme disregard for history, its mechanisms and its "lessons"... History isn't something you learn -- reluctantly -- in school; it's something you live (and re-live, unless you'd learnt your *first* lesson well) with on a daily basis... We wouldn't be in Iraq, if we'd remembered Vietnam... Argh...
Enough ranting.
But that's how you have an "Austria" label on a piece of *Venetian* (Italian) Gros Point...
-----
Tamara P Duvall
Lexington, Virginia, USA
Formerly of Warsaw, Poland
http://lorien.emufarm.org/~tpd/
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