The MAK
The MAK is home to an unparalleled collection of applied arts, design, architecture, and contemporary art which has developed in the course of 150 years.
In the way by which its collection came into being, the Imperial Royal Austrian Museum of Art and Industry, opened in 1864, was an exceptional case amidst the nascent Viennese museum landscape.
The museum, officially established in 1863 with an eye to promoting innovation, was a cultural institution based not on an imperial or noble collection but on one to be compiled from scratch, thereby following an entirely new concept that was closer to the bourgeois and liberal notion of advancing the trades than it was to any aristocratic representational desires. It was a modern museum oriented toward the needs of both the general populace and producers of goods.
The collection of oriental carpets in the MAK is one of the finest, most valuable, and best known in the world, although not one of the most extensive. The collection's emphasis on "classic" carpets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries derives from the former Austrian Imperial Family, whose carpets passed to the Museum after World War I. Examples of these are the silk hunting carpet and the silk Mameluke carpet, the only one in the world to have survived. It is still not certain how the carpets came into the possession of the Austrian Imperial Family, in which they were treated as very highly valued household objects, not as collector's items. In the East Asian world, the knotted carpet laid on the floor is the most important element of interior decoration, both in the nomadic period and in the ruler's palace. Artistic inventiveness, manual dexterity, and precious materials are therefore plentifully applied. Another source of the collection, which had started acquiring its own oriental carpets very early, is the Imperial and Royal Oriental or Trade Museum, whose carpets passed to the MAK when it was closed in 1907. / Angela Völker (curator of the MAK Textiles and Carpets Collection during the phase of the reinstallation of the MAK Permanent Collection in the early 1990s).