The Vienna Secession
“To every age its art, to art its freedom.” With those words above the entrance Gustav Klimt and his friends broke with the old Vienna. The Secession, Otto Wagner’s architecture and the Wiener Werkstätte made the city a centre of modern art and design.
In 1897 a group of artists around Gustav Klimt left the conservative artists’ association in the Künstlerhaus and formed the Vereinigung bildender Künstler Österreichs, known as the Secession. They wanted to show modern art from all over Europe and to treat painting, architecture and the decorative arts as equals. Joseph Maria Olbrich designed their exhibition building with a dome of gilded laurel leaves, and the journal Ver Sacrum spread their ideas.
Klimt became Vienna’s most controversial artist. His ceiling paintings for the university, with naked bodies and a dark view of the human condition, led to protests and debates in parliament, and he withdrew from the commission. Instead, in his golden period, he developed a painting in which gold leaf, pattern and ornament envelop the figures, as in The Kiss and the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer.
Architecture was renewed at the same time. Otto Wagner, professor at the academy, moved from historicism to a clean, functional style in the Postal Savings Bank and the Kirche am Steinhof. Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser founded the Wiener Werkstätte in 1903, where artists and craftsmen made furniture, silver, jewellery and textiles in austere, geometric forms. Adolf Loos went further still and wanted to abolish ornament altogether.