The Franko Prints: Joseph Urban’s Designs for the American Textile Market

Abstract While historical accounts of the Art Deco style in the United States often focus on the cultural influence of France, this article examines the impact of Viennese design on American taste through the work of architect and designer Joseph Urban. In particular, it offers new evidence that Urban persistently worked to disseminate the design aesthetic of the Wiener Werkstätte beyond the establishment of his renowned, yet short-lived New York gallery, Wiener Werkstätte America. In the early 2000s, the New York gallery Historical Design discovered a printed silk textile designed by Urban and manufactured by a company in Tennessee in 1928. This discovery unearthed the designer’s forgotten foray into textile design and led to the reattribution of dozens of textile samples in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art that were previously believed to be the work of Josef Hoffmann, Dagobert Peche, and Gustav Klimt. This article considers the cultural and social forces that brought these textiles into being and critically examines their source materials to reveal Urban’s continued engagement with motifs drawn from artists associated with the Wiener Werkstätte, as well as his own career, in an effort to promote Viennese Modernism to an American audience.