Vienna 1900: the Secession, Otto Wagner and Art Nouveau in Viennese architecture

Vienna 1900 is the name for the years around the turn of the century when Vienna's artists and architects broke with the borrowed styles of the Ringstrasse and created an Art Nouveau of their own, called the Secession. The most important buildings are Joseph Maria Olbrich's Secession Building from 1898 with its gilded dome of laurel leaves, Otto Wagner's Majolica House from 1899 and Postal Savings Bank from 1906, and Adolf Loos's Looshaus from 1911. At the same time Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser founded the Wiener Werkstätte in 1903, and Gustav Klimt painted The Kiss.

Facts

The Ringstrasse and the break of 1897

When Vienna's old city wall was demolished from 1857, the Ringstrasse was laid out in its place, a parade street lined with public buildings in historical styles: a Gothic Revival town hall, a parliament in Greek style, an opera house and museums in Neo-Renaissance. It was the greatest triumph of historicism. For the young generation around 1890 it was also a masquerade, in which modern buildings were dressed in old clothes.

In 1897 a group of artists, among them Gustav Klimt, Koloman Moser, Josef Hoffmann and Joseph Maria Olbrich, left the established artists' association and formed the Secession, from the Latin word for withdrawal. They wanted to bring foreign modern art into Vienna, erase the boundary between fine art and applied art and create a style for their own time. Vienna 1900 is the Austrian counterpart of Art Nouveau in the rest of Europe, but it became more austere and more geometric early on.

The Secession: a temple for the new art

The association's exhibition building, the Secession Building, was designed by Joseph Maria Olbrich and built in less than a year, 1897–1898. It is a white, almost cubic building with closed walls and a dome of gilded laurel leaves in wrought metal. Over the entrance stands the association's motto: Der Zeit ihre Kunst, der Kunst ihre Freiheit, to every age its art, to art its freedom. Viennese people called the dome the golden cabbage.

In the basement is Klimt's Beethoven Frieze, painted for an exhibition in 1902. The building lies at Karlsplatz, a stone's throw from the Baroque Karlskirche, and anyone standing between them can see two hundred years of difference at once. Olbrich later moved to Darmstadt and designed the artists' colony on the Mathildenhöhe.

Otto Wagner: from Art Nouveau to Modernism

Otto Wagner was already over fifty and an established architect when, in 1896, in the book Moderne Architektur, he demanded that architecture should start from modern life, new materials and new methods of construction. He designed the stations of Vienna's Stadtbahn (city railway), among them the two pavilions at Karlsplatz, and joined the Secession in 1899. He was the teacher of a whole generation, among them Olbrich and Hoffmann.

On the Linke Wienzeile, along the Naschmarkt, he built two apartment buildings in 1898–1899. The Majolica House has a façade clad in glazed tiles in a pattern of flowers and tendrils, and the neighbouring house has gilded medallions by Koloman Moser. A few years later he took the step towards Modernism with the Austrian Postal Savings Bank, 1904–1906. The façade is clad in thin marble slabs fixed with visible bolts with aluminium heads, and the banking hall has a glass roof, a glass floor and aluminium warm-air vents. Wagner designed everything in the building, right down to the armchairs.

Adolf Loos and the house without eyebrows

Adolf Loos went further than Wagner and turned against the Secession itself. In the lecture Ornament and Crime, which he gave in 1910, he claimed that ornament was waste and that a modern person did not need it. When in the same year he built a commercial and residential building at Michaelerplatz, directly opposite the emperor's palace, the Hofburg, the upper storeys were smooth, white-rendered and without window surrounds.

The Looshaus caused a scandal and was called the house without eyebrows. Construction was halted for a time until Loos had agreed to put up flower boxes under the windows. The ground floors are nevertheless clad in costly green-veined marble, and inside Loos worked with rooms on different levels. The house points straight ahead to Functionalism and to the idea that form should follow function.

The Wiener Werkstätte: everything is design

Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser founded the Wiener Werkstätte in 1903 together with the patron Fritz Waerndorfer, on the model of the English Arts and Crafts movement. The workshops made furniture, silver, jewellery, textiles and bookbindings to designs by architects and artists, with simple geometric forms, black and white and grids as hallmarks. The designers Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser are found in the design section, as are Moser's cubic armchair and the guide to the Wiener Werkstätte.

The most complete total work of art was built outside Vienna: the Palais Stoclet in Brussels, 1905–1911, where Hoffmann designed the house and the workshops everything in it, with mosaic friezes by Klimt in the dining room. While the palace was being built, Klimt painted The Kiss, 1907–1908, and in Vienna the young artists Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka were at work. Vienna 1900 ended with the First World War: Klimt, Wagner, Moser and Schiele all died in 1918.

Seeing Vienna 1900 today

Start at Karlsplatz with Wagner's station pavilions, the Karlskirche and the Secession Building, and walk along the Naschmarkt to the Majolica House. The Looshaus lies at Michaelerplatz in the Innere Stadt and the Postal Savings Bank at Georg-Coch-Platz near the Ringstrasse. Klimt's The Kiss is in the Belvedere, and objects from the Wiener Werkstätte are shown in the museum of applied arts, the MAK. The buildings can be found on the map and the period in the Austrian timeline.

How to recognise Vienna 1900

Exercise

Which building in Vienna was called the house without eyebrows because of its windows without surrounds?