MAK on displayPatrick Rampelotto - Josephine, 2013
Inspired by the new installation of the MAK Permanent Collection VIENNA 1900. Design / Arts and Crafts 1890–1938, the designer Patrick Rampelotto has created a piece of furniture evoking Adolf Loos’s well-known but never realized
design of a villa with black-and-white striped marble façade for the “scandalous” Josephine Baker. For her dance
performances in her scanty banana outfit Baker had been acclaimed since 1926 in the Folies Bergère in Paris as “the Black
Venus”; but in Vienna her solo appearance planned for the Ronacher Theater was cancelled at short notice; eventually
she was banned from appearing on stage in Vienna and several other European cities. Adolf Loos and his contemporaries saw
the opposing polarities of Modernism united in the controversial persona of the American dancer; with her attitude she symbolized
contemporary America with elements of the cosmopolitan, the savage, and of art. With the intervention Patrick Rampelotto: Josephine curated by Marlies Wirth and on show starting Tuesday, 1 October 2013, a designer is taking the stage for the second time
in “MAK on Display” in Wien Mitte – The Mall. The curtain went up first on Marco Dessí with his interpretation of a salon cabinet by Dagobert Peche (1913).
