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 around 67 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.