Marta Filipová: A fine line

Vortrag im Rahmen der Ausstellung ‘Textile Transfers’

Where does folk art end and design begin? Who is the author of the textiles designed by trained artists and made by anonymous hands in local workshops?
The lands of Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia (Upper Hungary before 1918) were historically rich with needlework courses and workshops that provided local women with an important source of income. Organised from Vienna before the end of WWI, lace and embroidery production came under the Czechoslovak administration and continued to supply mainly urban and international clientele. The talk focuses on Emilie Paličková Mildeová (1892-1973), a prominent Czech lace designer who transformed lace into a modern medium. Her creations were successfully exhibited internationally and advertised alongside more traditional and fully anonymous needlework. The work of Paličková Mildeová therefore invites questions about the narrow margin that divides folk art of regions north of Vienna from design and fine art. It also provides the opportunity to discuss the purposes for which the different types of lace were created both in Czechoslovakia and outside as well as the very definition of folk art.

Dr. Marta Filipová is Research Fellow at the Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, where she is the Principal Investigator of the project Beyond the Village: Folk Cultures as Agents of Modernity, 1918-1945. She has been working on the questions of identities in modern art and design and the politics of display. Her latest publication is Czechoslovakia at the World’s Fairs. Behind the Façade (CEU Press, 2024), she also published Modernity, History and Politics in Czech Art (Routledge, 2020) and edited the volume Cultures of International Exhibitions 1840-1940. Great Exhibitions in the Margins (Ashgate, 2015). She is a member of the editorial board of the journal Art East/Central.