Designer: Helmut Alder or Oswald Haerdtl (1899 - 1959)

Item: 2050 Flatware Service for 6 and carving set (not shown)

Manufactured by: Neuzeughammer Ambosswerk Austria

Country of origin: Austria

Year made: 1954

Materials: Stainless steel; box is wood and leather

Dimensions: Box is 2 ¼” x 12 ¾” x 7”

Description: Here an original series 2050 service for six designed by either Helmut Alder or Oswald Haedtl for Amboss Neuzeughammer Austria (also known as Neuzeughammer Ambosswerk) in 1954. This design is almost always attributed to Helmut Alder because it was cataloged in the Averwerser/Muller-Daehn book that documented all the Amboss flatware designs and their designers. However, this set also appears in Tulga Beyerle and Karin Hirschberger’s book A Century of Austrian Design: 1900-2005, which has a photo from the Werkbund Exhibition at the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria in 1955 where this set was shown. We are not able to deconflict these two sources of information from two different pieces of scholarship. However, it is well documented both Alder and Haeddtl did flatware designs for Amboss, so for now we are leaving to others to decide, and hopefully provide a more definitive answer.

Little is known about the life of Helmut Alder other than his documented designs. We have been unable to find any birth or death dates for him. However, Oswald Haerdtl was an important Austrian architect closely associated with Josef Hoffmann and whose designs have been shown and are in many major museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. According information found on the Internet, in the early 1950s Hans Malzacher bought the Amboss Neuzeughammer company and recruited architects and designers such as Haerdtl and Carl Aubock to produce flatware designs for it.

This set appears unused. This service for six consists of five-pieces per place setting of the dinner knife, dinner fork, salad fork, tablespoon, and teaspoon. These pieces of flatware are thick and heavy stainless with the same quality as the rival Aubock set 2060 also produced by Amboss at the same time. The knives are each marked Amboss Neuzeug Made in Austria Stainless with the Amboss anvil mark, and the other pieces are marked on the verso Amboss Rostfrei Austria Stainless Super with the anvil mark. The original box crafted in the shape of a shipping crate retains its stickers indicating awards won at the Milano Triennial and dated 1958. Although we have seen other sets in the original wood crates we have not seen any that retain all their original stickers and dating them. We are including with this set a complete matching carving set in it’s original box that also appears unused.

References: Averwerser, Heinz-Jurgen and Muller-Dehn, Jorg, Amboss: Bestecke - Flatware 1950 - 1992, Katalog zu den Ausstellungen in Solingen und Hannover 2010; Beyerle, Tulga and Hirschberger, Karin, A Century of Austrian Design: 1900-2005, Birkhauser Verlag (2006), pg. 127

Condition: Excellent and appears rarely, if ever used in original box that has wear.