Wolfgang von Wersin

Who was Wolfgang von Wersin?

Wolfgang von Wersin is a Czech-born designer, painter, architect and author that developed his career in Germany.

He studied architecture at the Technische University of Munich and, in parallel, he also studied drawing and painting at the Lehr- und Versuch-Atelier für Angewandte und Freie Kunst, a reform oriented art school in the same city. Then, from 1906 onwards, after he completed his military service, became a tutor there. His constant collaborator and eventual wife, the German printmaker and draughtswoman Herthe Sch?pp, met him as his pupil. In 1909 he began working as a designer for numerous firms, including the Behr furniture factory and the Meissen porcelain manufacturers. In 1929, he assumed the directorship of the Neue Sammlung established in Munich in 1925, the department for artisan art at the National Museum – and remained there until his illegal dismissal by the national socialists in 1934.

In 1956 he wrote The Book of Rectangles, Spatial Law and Gestures of The Orthogons Described, in which he describes a set of 12 dynamic rectangles he calls orthogons.