Invitation to the Defense of Michael Zoe Dewitt

The Examination Panel is made up of: Anna Pritz (chair), Elisabeth von Samsonow (first supervisor), Felicitas Thun-Hohenstein (second supervisor), and Elena Shapira (external appraiser).

Abstract

This work is the first comprehensive monograph on the Austro-American jewelry designer Countess Cis („Cissy“) Zoltowska, née Frankl (1919-2004), who has been working within the environment of the Parisian haute couture in the 1950s and 60s and played a key role in shaping the boom in fashion jewelry during the „golden age of haute couture“. Based on hundreds of newspaper articles, archival sources and accounts from friends, Cissy Zoltowska’s hitherto largely unknown life story is reconstructed, her family background in the Hungarian gentry and Jewish Viennese high bourgeoisie of the late Austro-Hungarian monarchy is explored and the development of her jewelry work from the early 1950s to the 1990s is documented. Based on inconsistancies in Zoltowska’s self-representation, the work unfolds as a multi-layered psychological portrait, which deals, besides the construction of the jewelry designer’s personal and business identity, also with strategies of repression and Zoltowska’s esoteric thinking. The work is supplemented by accompanying theoretical considerations based on the semiotics of jewelry according to Roland Barthes and the sociology of nobility by Pierre Bourdieu.

Short biography

Zoe Dewitt (born March 12, 1962 in Vienna) works as an artist interdisciplinarily in the fields of electroacoustic and electronic music, performance, video, photography, painting and philosophy. She gained international recognition with the musical solo project Zero Kama (album: The Secret Eye of L.A.Y.L.A.H.), which is considered a trailblazer of the ritual industrial/ritual ambient genre.

The thesis defense will be in German and will take place at the Academy of fine Arts at Schillerplatz 3, 1010 Vienna, in room S15 (Anatomiesaal).

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