1925 Viennese Physical Culture Phtotgraph of a Child

This photograph of a young boy was taken in 1925 by Viennese photographer Rudolf Jobst. The work reflects both the cult of the body that so influenced Austrian society during the first half of the 20th century and the highly influential aesthetic of the Wiener Werkstatte, one of the progenitors of modernist design. Both a philosophy and a craze, physical culture permeated every aspect of Austrian society: from a revival of pantomime in the theater, to the free dance movement of Grete Wiesenthal, to an explosion in competitive weight lifting and the myth of Vienna as the city of “the strongest men.” Additionally, the focus of Austrian Expressionists Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele on psychologically-charged portraiture and the nude all expressed the fear and, after World War I, the reality of the collapse of the old order. The clean lines and geometric composition of our photograph subscribes to the Wiener Werkstatte's belief in a modernist design vocabulary. Both an academy and a work