The Vienna Secession: A History

I sincerely regret that when I went to Vienna, I only knew it for the music; where greats like Mozart, Strauss and Beethoven (among others) plied their trade and not to mention _The_ Vienna Philharmonic.

But since I'm more into visual arts anyway, I naturally checked out the vibrant (pun intended) art museums too. That's where I learned of Gustav Klimt and the Secession movement. That's where I started to become intensely fascinated with Art Nouveau/Jugendstil.

(When I was there, the Albertina had a contemporary art exhibit for the art duos Hauenschild Ritter and Muntean/Rosenbloom. It was a personal religious experience seeing those works. I won't write an essay here as to why because it's tangential to the topic. I accept maybe a lot of people will say "religious experience" is hyperbole (it's not). But the point is Vienna's cultural footprint is not just classical music.)

Unfortunately, I didn't have time anymore to visit the Secession building when I was there. But the plus side is that I have a reason to return.

There's a documentary about the vienna secession focused on klimt, and it's a really interesting watch. I went into cinema thinking oh well what i'm gonna learn and when it was over i had gained a much richer comprehension about the historical period and klimt himself. An italian movie distributor often has cycles when they show art documentaries like this for a few days each month, every month a different one, and i have to say the ones i've been to they were always top notch (from an uninformed point of view)

https://seventh-art.com/product/klimt-and-the-kiss/

Interesting article -- thanks for sharing!

I'm surprised though that the article honors and praises things while at the same time spelling them consequently wrong. One would assume they would at least spend the effort to keep the Umlauts.

    The Akademie de bildende Kunste = Die Akademie der bildenden Künste
    Kunstlerhaus Genessenschaft = Künstlerhaus Genossenschaft
    Hagengesalleschaft’ = Hagengesellschaft
    Hagendbund = Hagenbund
    Gesamkunstwerk = Gesamtkunstwerk
    Kunsthistoriches museum = Kunsthistorisches Museum
    Ringstrasse = Ringstraße

The Vienna Secession is probably my favorite of all the historical art movements. There was an early art zine called Ver Sacrum. My personal favorite artist of this scene, Koloman Moser, made a lot of the covers and included artwork, as well as a variety of really cool tessellation patterns.

The University of Heidelberg has an online site with a lot of high quality scans of Ver Sacrum and related publications. There is a lot of variety in the Vienna Secession, and its aesthetic stretched all the way from graphic design to architecture and even interior design.

For those who want a bit of Secession without going to Vienna: the Neue Galerie[1] in NYC has one of the largest Secession/Wiener Werkstatte collections outside of Austria.

(A fact that the website doesn't touch on is that the Vienna Secession was critical in defining what the Nazis eventually labeled "degenerate" art, and that much of the surviving Secession work is of unclear provenance after being expropriated before and during WWII. There are a bunch of small plaques all around the Leopold and Albertina museums that make oblique reference to this.)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neue_Galerie_New_York

Thanks for this. To my untrained eye, I had always considered Secession style to be "rectilinear art nouveau". I know there's more to it, but that paragraph in the article talking about the differences between art nouveau/jugendstil and the Secession style did confirm at least that part of my take on it.

still one of the best (if not THE best) places to discover contemporary art in vienna.