Albums

Eugenie Goldstern Photographic Collection – Research-Oriented Ethnographic Photography

The photographic estate of Eugenie Goldstern (1883/84–1942), preserved at the Volkskundemuseum Wien, comprises around 470 photographs and ranks among the early visual records of ethnographic fieldwork. Between 1913 and 1921, Goldstern documented architecture, everyday life, and material culture in the Alpine regions of France, Austria, and Switzerland. Complemented by photographs from Egypt and Eastern Europe, her images reflect the transition from collecting practices to a more scientific and respectful mode of observation at a time when folklore studies remained strongly shaped by normative and hierarchical perspectives. Approximately two-thirds of the photographs in the collection were taken by Goldstern herself – an exceptionally high proportion that attests to the active photographic practice of this pioneering ethnologist, who was murdered in 1942 as a victim of Nazi persecution in the Sobibor extermination camp. After decades of neglect, Goldstern’s photographic estate was fully catalogued, conserved, and made digitally accessible beginning in 2018. Today, the collection is available through the Online Collection Plus together with her publications, archival materials, and literature on her life and work, providing for the first time a comprehensive resource for the study of her methods, biography, and the history of ethnographic research.

Merely a Means to an End? The Early Negatives of the Volkskundemuseum Wien

The first 1,500 entries in the negative inventory – predominantly glass plates – depict ‘the rural’ in the Alpine and Danube regions between 1900 and 1938: farmhouses, village squares, traditional costumes, and sacred objects. Produced by museum staff and regional specialists, they reflect the research interests and visual aesthetics of their time. Many negatives were created as reproductions of positive images or as excerpts from publications. They served for the production of prints, slides, and printed illustrations and were long regarded merely as a means to an end. Today, however, they are increasingly valued as material objects in their own right, particularly in research contexts: retouchings, interventions, material deterioration, and traces of storage become visible in color digitizations, opening up new insights for a range of disciplines.

Embroidery Patterns

The pattern sheets for canvas embroidery in the collection of the Volkskundemuseum Wien (Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art) offer a glimpse into the diversity of motifs found in embroidery patterns, which have been mass-produced since the Biedermeier period. In the 19th century, there was a seemingly endless selection of figurative, floral, and ornamental patterns available on pattern paper. The embroidery patterns were used by women of the upper classes for their needlework as a leisure activity befitting their social standing in social gatherings, but also by embroiderers who had to earn their living with them.

The museum’s collection consists of approximately 200 embroidery patterns for canvas embroidery. These are individual sheets in a wide variety of formats, the majority of which are hand-colored dot patterns. The embroidery patterns mostly originate from the offerings of well-known publishers and art dealers in Vienna and Berlin. This article focuses particularly on the sheets from the first half of the 19th century.

Belts (Bauchranzen): Splendor to Fasten Around the Waist

Belt (Bauchranzen) are wide, usually elaborately crafted buckle belts made of leather that are still worn today mainly in parts of Austria, Italy, Germany, the Czech Republic, Romania, and Poland. They serve both practical and representational purposes. Their production requires considerable time, materials, and labor, which in the past particularly reflected the social status of the wearer. In addition to their function as splendid leather accessories and as means of storage and transport, they often carry personal and symbolic meanings and express a sense of belonging. Their ornate decorations range from embroidery with quills, gold and leather strapes to fittings made of tin or brass studs. This type of belt is still worn today in traditional costume and marksmen’s associations or on festive occasions.

Since the museum’s founding in 1894, a wide variety of belts (Bauchranzen) have been acquired by the Volkskundemuseum Wien. Around 230 pieces are now part of the textile and clothing collection. Here—within the Online Collection Plus—50 selected examples (as of April 2026) provide insight into the diversity of places of production and use, forms, materials, techniques, and motifs.

The Imaginative World of Eleonore Grant

In 2021, the Volkskundemuseum Wien received a small collection of handmade, imaginatively illustrated booklets and little books as a donation. The images in these small-format works were created by Eleonore Grant, an aunt of the donor. Produced around 1945, the unique items were intended as personal gifts from the artist, born in 1930, to her family.

The 17 originally illustrated booklets in the collection complement the museum’s existing holdings of personally produced picture books made for private use. The donation also included an illustrated calendar and ten loose sheets with watercolour and ink drawings. In the imaginative stories and images of these carefully crafted individual works, personified flowers and insects as well as humanoid mythical creatures play a central role. With her small booklets, Eleonore Grant shared moments of joy in a period when her life was shaped by war and displacement.

Hairwork Pictures

The museum’s wide-ranging collection of objects made from human hair includes love tokens and gifts, jewellery, commemorative and memorial pictures, album pages, artistic hairwork images, devotional pieces, and votive offerings. Giving, preserving, and artistically working with human hair were deeply personal acts, expressing affection, remembrance, and devotion.

In 1981, the special exhibition Jewellery Made of Hair (Schmuck aus Haaren) presented works from the museum’s entire collection of hairwork, including many pictures created with hair embroidery and cut-and-paste techniques. During the preparation of the exhibition, the already established collection of commemorative, devotional, and memorial images, as well as artistic works featuring human hair at the Volkskundemuseum Wien (Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art), was selectively expanded through new acquisitions. As a result, the collection has grown to 66 hair pictures, representing a wide range of techniques and forms associated with this unique culture of remembrance.

R.I.P. – Memorial Cards Collected by Josef Schwarzbach

Our collection holds over 1,000 memorial cards. These are small, individually designed slips of paper or cards, often including prayers, created to commemorate the deceased and distributed at funerals. The memorial cards preserved at the Volkskundemuseum Wien date mostly from the 19th and early 20th centuries. They speak of people, lives, death, beliefs, moral concepts, mourning, and remembrance. Taken together, they are valuable historical and socio-cultural sources; individually, they provide genealogical insights. The collection at the Volkskundemuseum can be traced back above all to one person: more than 900 examples were gathered by school principal and teacher Josef Schwarzbach (1853–1896). In 1898, they were inventoried as a generous donation.

‘The lights were like a sea – and the sea is invincible.’

It was with these impactful words that Friedrich ‘Fritz’ Verzetnitsch, then President of the Austrian Trade Union Federation (ÖGB), described one of the greatest civil society events in the history of the Second Austrian Republic: the ‘sea of lights’, which took place in Vienna on 23 January 1993.

Up to 300,000 people gathered on Heldenplatz square and in the adjacent streets in Vienna’s First District to send out a powerful signal against xenophobia, exclusion and an increasingly polarising migration policy using candles, torches and their silent presence.

Lights Off, Spotlight On: 1,000 Glass Slides and the First Slide Lectures of Volkskundemuseum Wien

The first 1,000 slide numbers in the inventory of Volkskundemuseum Wien (Austrian Museum of Folk Art and Folk Life) were primarily produced between 1900 and 1927 for (popular) scholarly slide lectures, often focusing on geographical and cultural aspects of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. As early as around 1900, many of these glass slides were used by museum staff in so-called "sciopticon lectures" (from Greek dia = through, skopein = to look). However, a systematic cataloguing and inventorying of the slides only began around 1915. The corresponding entries are usually limited to a brief description of the depicted subject. Additional information – such as details on production or use – is almost entirely lacking.

Only the clear thematic structure of the inventory book provides clues about the content of the lectures illustrated by these images. Lecturers with backgrounds in folklore studies – such as Michael Haberlandt (1860–1940), Arthur Haberlandt (1889–1964), Rudolf Trebitsch (1876–1918), Marianne Schmidl (1890–1945), and Konrad Mautner (1880–1924) – presented their slide shows primarily at the Wiener Urania, the University of Vienna, various associations, and at the Volkskundemuseum Wien itself. After the founding of the State Office for Adult Education (Volksbildungsamt) in 1919, the slides were increasingly used in educational courses for teachers.

Between Documentation and Staging: Photographs of Galicia and Bukovina in the Volkskundemuseum Wien Photo Collection

The first inventoried item in the Volkskundemuseum Wien (Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art) photo collection, pos/1, was taken by Josef Szombathy (1853–1943) in Bukovina in 1894. It shows Austriaplatz square in Chernivtsi (Czernowitz). Additional photographs from the former Austrian crown lands, the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, and the Duchy of Bukovina, were added to the photo collection from 1896 onwards, which at that time was still part of the Museum für österreichische Volkskunde (Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art) library.

The name Galicia refers to a historical region that stretched across what is now southern Poland and western Ukraine. At the eastern end of Galicia was the smaller historical region of Bukovina. Today, this region belongs to Ukraine and Romania. The former territory of Poland-Lithuania was divided into three parts (1772, 1793 and 1795) following armed conflicts between Prussia, Russia and Austria. Galicia and Bukovina were the names given to the territories that were assigned to Habsburg rule.

Beehive Front Panels

Apiaries equipped with box-shaped beehives became increasingly popular in Carniola (Krain), Carinthia and northwestern Slovenian Styria in the 19th century.

A special feature of the beehives in this region are painted beehive panels mounted on the front of the wooden boxes, which have an entrance hole at the bottom edge. Volkskundemuseum Wien (Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art) possesses more than 230 of these painted panels with different decorative images. The paintings depict religious motifs, peasant life, satirical scenes, technical innovations and historic events.

Franz Gaul and Josef Löwy – The Collectible Picture Series "Austro-Hungarian National-Costumes" (1881–1890)

The collectible picture series Austro-Hungarian National-Costumes (1881–1890) consists of 72 illustrations depicting regional costumes from various areas of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. It was produced by Franz Gaul (1837–1906), a historical painter and costume expert, and photographer Josef Löwy (1834–1902). The series was published in various formats, including leather-bound portfolios and individual images in the rarely used Carte de Boudoir format. It was aimed at the wealthier circles of society, with a single image costing the equivalent of approximately 25 euros in today’s purchasing power.

With its focus on Alpine regions, particularly Tyrol and South Tyrol (now part of Italy), the series soon became a source of inspiration for the bourgeois costume movement. The Volkskundemuseum Wien (Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art) houses 145 images related to the series, including duplicates and drafts, providing valuable insights into production processes. These holdings not only enable comparative analyses but also inspire new research questions.

Old Gmunden Faience

During the period between the museum's foundation and the end of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, the museum consistently acquired Gmunden objects. In an era of increasing industrial production, museums collected handcrafted objects in order to save them from disappearing and being forgotten. Every now and then, extensive collections from private individuals would also find their way into the museum’s collection. The majority of today's holdings of around 350 objects had already been catalogued by 1918.

Acquisition activity continued on a smaller scale from then on, with holdings from the period between 1938 and 1945 now being investigated by restitution research. Hardly any major new acquisitions were made after that, apart from some green-flamed bowls from a private collection, which were purchased in 2005.

Right From the Start – The First 1,000 Positives of the Photo Collection

The origins and early history of the photo collection are best and most impressively shown when we look at positive inventory numbers pos/1 to pos/1000 (see Hammer 2020). The photographs in this collection were acquired in the first ten years after the museum was founded, i.e. between 1895 and 1905.

Collecting these photographs was important to the museum from the very beginning. After all, photographs were seen as witnesses to a ‘disappearing’ culture as well as a medium for depicting or ‘collecting’ what was intangible or too bulky for the collections (see Haberlandt 1896), e.g. small monuments or houses.

Prinzess-Keramik

Prinzess-Keramik is the name of a company that produced ceramics in Vienna during the post-war period. In addition to utility ceramics, such as mirror frames, lamps and candlesticks, the company mainly manufactured figurines based on both secular and religious motifs. Being exported to many countries around the world, these ceramic figures used to shape the image of Austria at home and abroad.

In 2005, the Volkskundemuseum purchased a group of Prinzess-Keramik objects by a private collector couple. These objects were added to the ceramics collection and given the inventory numbers ÖMV/83123 to 83193. At the time, there was no literature on this type of ceramics and no objects were known to exist in other museums.

Library / Self-PublishedÖsterreichische Zeitschrift für VolkskundeAlbums