Josef Hoffmann Hammered Silver Flower Basket

The design of Josef Hoffmann’s flower baskets was inspired by the Japanese hanakago—a bamboo flower basket distinguished by its soaring handle. As a founding member of the Wiener Werkstätte, Hoffmann embraced Japanese design as a foundational influence on the Secession style. He believed that, through Japanese models, artists could learn “to see form itself” and reduce it to the essential “element of line.” The tall, arching handle of the hanakago allowed space for vertical flower arrangements, which are an integral part of Japanese interior decoration. These baskets were intended to be either suspended or placed on the floor of the tokonoma, the traditional alcove used for displaying art. Each was designed to hold a single flower or a small composition inserted into a bamboo tube. For the pattern of the vase, Hoffmann used Gitterwerk, a technique using sheet metal perforated with a regular pattern of squares. In chair backs, the Scottish designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh pioneered the use of cut or incised squares as decorative motifs. The Wiener Werkstätte transformed this motif into the integral structure. Made in sterling silver, this versatile form of lattice work became a signature of the workshop’s production. In the context of the flower vase, the gitterwerk emulates the classic European garden trellis—one of the oldest structural forms in Western garden design. Cast in lustrous silver, the basket becomes a modular grid, evoking the rational geometry and orderly repetition characteristic of modern architecture.