Wien I Bellaria

Famous for her bird’s-eye panoramas like this one of the bustling Bellariastrasse in Vienna, Emma Bormann had a successful career as a printmaker, specializing in scenes of urban life in cities across the globe. This woodcut represents several of Vienna’s iconic sites, notably the Austrian Parliament Building seen in the upper left of the composition. In the center, pedestrians, trolley cars, and horse-drawn carriages make their way across the crowded street. Bormann studied printmaking at the Academy of Vienna in the early decades of the 20th century. At the age of thirty, she published her first woodcuts and spent the next two decades touring various European cities. Inspired by her travels to Munich, Paris, Florence, Venice, Dalmatia, and Istanbul, Bormann executed street views of each of those places. After the end of World War II, she ventured across the Atlantic Ocean to the United States, making woodcuts of landmarks in New York, Washington D.C., and San Francisco. In the 1950s she journeyed to Asia, spending a number of years in China and then Japan, where she documented local cultural activities in a series of prints.