VIENNA'S LOVE OF BEAUTY

Going broke for love of beauty :

A modern collective in Vienna turned into a commercial basket case.

Before modern design was streamlined, it got intricate; before modern design was industrialized, it came from human hands.

In Vienna in the early 1900s, a last gasp of artisanal furniture and homewares emerged from a new kind of workshop. in which artists and craftsmen worked side by side.

Elsewhere standardization swept through industry, and assembly lines alienated workers from the fruits of labor.

But these designers saw another path forward, one that made virtue out of objectivity, durability and craftsmanship.

To be modern, for these designers, was to be on the shop floor.

''Wiener Werksatte, 1903-32 : ''The Luxury of Beauty'', a handsome exhibition full of covetable objects at Neue Galerie in New York, tells the story of Vienna's most glamorous design firm, which was always better at fabricating teapots and printing textiles than at turning profit.

The show packs the museum's third-floor galleries, which have been hing with patterned curtains and other temporary wall treatments; pops up in the permanent galleries below-

And spills on to the streets, where the front porch of the museum;s proud town house- has been upholstered with a blue and white carpet reproducing the floor of Vienna's Cabaret Fledermaus, one of the firm's big early commissions

[The show, running through Jan 29 has been organized by the Neue Galerie curator's Christian Witt-Doring and Janis Staggs, both of whom have presented earlier shows of decorative arts at the museum].