Secession Building
The exhibition hall of the Vienna Secession, the group of artists around Gustav Klimt who broke with academic art. Above the entrance are the words “To every age its art, to art its freedom”. The white cube is crowned by an openwork dome of gilded laurel leaves, which the Viennese called the cabbage.
In 1897 a group of artists and architects in Vienna broke with the conservative Künstlerhaus and formed the Vienna Secession, with Gustav Klimt as president. They needed an exhibition hall of their own, and Joseph Maria Olbrich, a young assistant of Otto Wagner, designed it. The building was erected quickly in 1897–1898 on a site near the Karlsplatz provided by the city. It was built with a masonry structure, smooth rendered walls and a dome of gilded iron. The building was to be a manifesto for the new art and at the same time a practical tool, with light-filled galleries that could be changed for each exhibition. Above the entrance was placed the critic Ludwig Hevesi’s motto about the age and art, which sums up the movement’s programme.
The building consists of two parts: a closed, almost temple-like entrance block and, behind it, a large exhibition hall. The entrance is flanked by four pylons that carry the openwork dome, and the façade is adorned with three Gorgon heads, owls and twining plant ornament. Inside the hall, skylights provide even daylight, and the walls could be moved to create new spaces. For the fourteenth exhibition in 1902, devoted to Beethoven, Klimt painted his Beethoven Frieze directly onto the walls. It was meant to be removed afterwards but was preserved and is now displayed in the basement. The combination of simple geometric volumes and precious gilded details became typical of the Viennese Secession and distinguishes it from the more organic Art Nouveau of Belgium and France.
The building was badly damaged in the Second World War and burned in 1945. It was restored in several phases, and during a major renovation in the 1980s the dome was regilded and the Beethoven Frieze given a permanent home. Today the building is still used by the Secession for contemporary art, true to its original purpose. It has become one of Vienna’s best-known symbols and has even appeared on an Austrian euro coin. The geometric rigour that Olbrich, Wagner and Josef Hoffmann developed in Vienna formed a bridge from Art Nouveau to Modernism. In Sweden its influence can be seen in several places around the beginning of the 20th century, including the façade of Dramaten on Nybroplan, where the white surface and gilded details have a distinctly Viennese character.