Lace Ware. An Album 1900 – 1954 (2025)
Herbert Stattler with texts by Martin Bauer
Herbert Stattler explores a history with 38 drawings encompassing other and further stories. It revolves around the biography of a Stuttgart company that commissioned and distributed lace are. Stattler's drawings are based on the company’s archives, offering a kaleidoscope of fragments of time, revealing simultaneously textile, technical, cultural, and consumer history. Since the plots concerns the history of handwork, Stattler's series not only addresses their techniques but also the working conditions of female home-based labor. This extends the album into the realm of social and economic history in the first half of the 20th century: World War I, the turbulence of the Weimar Republic, the rise of the Nazis, and World War II. However, lace ware production is not limited to purely material and historical dimensions. Its patterns echo significant aspects of both older and more recent art history. We see the evolution of ornament—from its rise in the Renaissance, its devaluation as mere decoration, even a »crime« according to Adolf Loos, to its emancipation as an aesthetic practice of autonomous form finding.
Lace Ware. An Album 1900 – 1954
Artwork Herbert Stattler
Text Martin Bauer
Translation Anne Greenwood MacKinney
Copyediting of the German edition Jan-Frederik Bandel
Concept Herbert Stattler, Helmut Völter
Graphic design Helmut Völter
Digital reproduction Recom Art Care, Berlin
Prepress Carsten Humme, Leipzig
Printing & Binding DZA Druckerei zu Altenburg GmbH
13.4 x 9.5 inch, 168 pages, language: English
Hardcover (twin book) with 38 b/w images and 38 duplex images. 4-page cover with embossing and foil stamping.
ISBN 978-3-95905-884-1
Spector Books
Harkortstraße 10
D-04107 Leipzig
Special Edition
›Lace Ware. An Album 1900-1954‹ is also available as a signed special edition in a run of three copies, numbered from 1 – 3, featuring one original drawing. Each drawing is a variation of a drawing in the series ›Spitzenwaren‹ [Lace Ware], wrapped in a paper envelope and tissue paper. Format of the drawing: 13.4 x 13.4 inch. Box: lid and bottom made from cardboard, covered inside and out with paper. Cassette lid with magnetic closure. Format of the box: 16.2 x 16.2 x 2 inch. Available at:
Galerie Druck & Buch
Berggasse 21/2
A-1090 Wien
The series of drawings, as well as the album, have been supported by several institutions. Without their funding, neither could have been produced: I thank the Stiftung Kunstfonds – NEUSTART KULTUR, NEUSTARTplus, and the German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media (BKM); the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sport, Department IV/A/6, Division IV: Arts and Culture; the Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion Berlin; and Bildrecht Vienna, Gesellschaft zur Wahrnehmung visueller Rechte.
