Image A suffrage button using the British “Clarion” design. Credit Collection of Kenneth Florey

AUSTRIAN DECORATIVE ARTS

Harry C. Sigman gave a recent tour of a Manhattan museum filled with his own former possessions. Mr. Sigman, a Los Angeles lawyer, has donated more than 100 Austrian and German objects from the early 1900s to the museum, Neue Galerie New York.

Docents in training followed him around the Neue’s display cases as he explained the relationships between patrons like the Grand Duke of Hesse and innovative manufacturers and artisans like the Wiener Werkstätte collaborative and the Kayserzinn metalwork factory. During decades of collecting, he said, he trolled auctions and galleries in Europe and the United States and carried purchases home in his own luggage.

His favorite forms are restrained and disciplined. “I was really very happy when I got this knife and fork,” he said, pointing to silver cutlery with teardrop handles by the Belgian designer Henry van de Velde.

The donated collection ranges “from the humblest, most modest to the most elegant,” said Renée Price, the museum’s director. The docents filed past a van de Velde tin for dietary supplements; ceramic vessels for salt and eggs by the German designer Richard Riemerschmid; and a pewter candlestick by Joseph Maria Olbrich.

Mr. Sigman still owns scores of early-1900s objects, including a chunk of a Paris Métro station and inlaid furniture by the French designers Louis Majorelle and Émile Gallé. He plans to donate them to other institutions. Without the German and Austrian contingent at his home now, he said, “I can’t say it feels empty, but it sure feels denuded.”

Image Sheet music with a “Give Mother the Vote” theme. Credit Collection of Kenneth Florey

In a March 6 design auction, Sotheby’s in New York is offering versions of the Neue gifts: a pair of Olbrich candlesticks and a Wiener Werkstätte vase with brass grid filigree have estimates of up to $8,000 each.