21st & 18th reports on the pulse of culture, then & now. Covering art, history and fashion featuring interviews with voices in fashion and the arts. Follow 21st & 18th (@21stand18th) on Instagram.
Written by Lauren Lynch Wemple (@lolynchwemple), you can expect two articles per week.
I’m just back from a recent trip abroad. First, a stop in Porto, Portugal for the wedding of two wonderful Portuguese-American friends. Then, Austria.
Oh, Austria. How I have been spellbound by you since I was a teenager and began to study history, art and architecture. There is something about the melting pot of the Habsburg empire, 19th century artists toiling away in Vienna rubbing shoulders with psychologists, philosophers and the ghosts of virtuosos such as Mozart and Beethoven all mixed together with the country’s sublime landscape, delicious food, excellent wine and the architecture, well, there are no words, unless I’m penning a poem, to describe the stately graciousness and beauty of Austria’s capital city, Vienna.
21st & 18th could pen dozens of Vienna guides, but we focus on art, history and fashion here and today we’re musing on about our latest obsession: the Vienna Secession.
Art history is the global study of art, our visual social culture, and the art historical canon is made up of chapters, some of which you may be familiar with, Impressionism or Pop Art, for example. I studied art history in university and when I was taking loads of specialized courses I found, once I had the nuts and bolts of a movement or an artist and their body of work, it helped to dig deeper into the history of said artist’s country of origin and place of residence when they were at their most creative. For example, if you’re studying the work of Johannes Vermeer it is critical to understand what was happening across the Netherlands during his lifetime in order to better understand and analyze his work.
What was the Vienna Secession?
While in Vienna, I visited a lot of museums, specifically art museums, and was focused on Viennese artists of the late 19th century. My husband, Wemple, and I pre and post gamed our museum visits by learning more about Vienna and the wider Austro Hungarian Empire during the late 1800s and turn of the century. What we walked away from our trip, and many museum visits, with was an emotional understanding of the art of Vienna as transformed by the Vienna Secession, a movement catalyzed in 1897 by Austrian painters, designers, architects and sculptors who departed the traditional Association of Austrian Artists. The leader of the Vienna Secession? None other than Austrian art’s biggest celeb: Gustav Klimt.
For us to fathom how professionally shattering it would have been to leave an art association, one must understand that in Europe, beginning in the 17th century, every established artist was expected to be a member of an organized association, which created bottlenecks for art talent as social status, wealth and sex (women were not admitted to most of these academies or associations until the late 18th century) acted as a filter keeping the number of “respectable and qualified” artists low and their stratagems for attracting patronage quite narrow.
In Vienna during the late 1800s, most professional and notable artists were members of the Association of Austrian Artists, or Künstlerhaus, which was founded in 1868 and today is still located in Vienna’s 1st District on the Ringstrassenzone. Interestingly, the artists who led the defection from the Künstlerhaus expressly noted their leaving and starting the Vienna Secession was “...Not a combat of modern artists against those of the past, but the promotion of the arts against the peddlers who pose as artists and who have a commercial interest in not letting art bloom. The choice between commerce and art is the issue at stake in our Secession. It is not a debate over aesthetics, but a confrontation between two different spiritual states." (Hermann Bahr, Ver Sacrum, 1897) The Vienna Secession was not necessarily about painting, designing or building in a new and different manner, rather it was a philosophical, and almost emotional, movement based on the values of artists. The movement was posing the question to all Austrian artists: Are you creating art for art’s sake?
Which artists were involved?
Gustav Klimt (Austrian, b. 1862 - d. 1918)
The leader of the Secession movement, Klimt is likely the name that first came to mind when a 21st & 18th article on Austrian artists popped into your inbox. Klimt is globally recognized, *I’ll add beloved, for his symbolic paintings and art works. His pieces are emotional and alive, viewing them through your phone or computer screen is exciting but seeing them in real life in his hometown of Vienna changes you.
What I find most interesting about Klimt is the purity of his artwork, specifically his timeless landscape paintings that, for me, make the French Impressionists appear even more basic than I previously thought them. There is an easy elegance in the perspective of Klimt paintings and his female portraits contain restrained yet intense emotions his sitters, as women in the swiftly changing political landscape of Europe at the turn of the 19th century, must have felt. On your next trip to Vienna, I recommend visiting the Leopold Museum first and the Upper Belvedere the following day for a comprehensive introduction and first date with Klimt. Notice how his portrait paintings are dripping, oozing with emotions like sadness, the pain of the human experience, lust and the conviviality of life.
Koloman Moser (Austrian, b. 1868 - d. 1918)
Koloman Moser, in addition to being a founding member of the Vienna Secession, was an illustrator and painter. He served as Art Director for the Wiener Werkstätte, an association that brought together architects, artists, designers and artisans working in ceramics, fashion, silver, furniture and graphic art, from 1903 - 1907 before departing to focus entirely on his painting. Moser taught at the Kunstgewerbeschule, or University of Applied Arts in Vienna, until his death in 1918.
As you review Moser’s work, notice how his illustrations feel incredibly familiar. Think of marketing and posters and fonts you’ve seen across your lifetime. He beautifully led the art nouveau and modern illustration movements and his pieces have a feminine mythological energy mixed up with the audaciousness that you get from contemporary painters of his such as Paris based Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. As I’m in the midst of starting a new brand, J. Gray (@jgraybrand), his art work gives me fresh branding ideas.
Otto Wagner (Austrian, b. 1841 - d. 1918)
Otto Wagner was an architect and teacher and is credited with being the father of the modern movement in European architecture. Wagner’s groundbreaking architectural practice was focused on function, material and structure as the foundational principles of architectural design, whereas architects before him were more focused on structure and harmony through symmetry and stateliness via ornamentation.
Fun fact: The members of the Vienna Secession elected Joseph Maria Olbrich, a young associate in Otto Wagner’s architectural firm, to design the building that would become the Secession movement’s headquarters and space for meetings and exhibitions. The iconic white, square temple-esque building still stands and operates in Vienna (and is available for your to visit, learn more here).
Josef Hoffmann (Austrian-Moravian, b. 1870 - d. 1956)
A fascinating renaissance man, Josef Hoffmann was a Vienna Secession artist who specialized in architecture and design but excelled in illustration, glass and furniture making and, even, working with silver - have a look at his entry on MoMA’s website to get a sense of the vastness of his artistic skills. The inspiring thing about studying Hoffmann is realizing how productive AND good he was at creating - the two rarely go together. Perhaps a boon to his creative productivity Hoffmann also co-founded the artist association called the Wiener Werkstätte. He was an excellent furniture designer as well as illustrator but is most remembered for his architectural achievements across Europe, if you’ve ever visited Brussels note that Stoclet House was designed by Hoffmann.
Honorable mentions
Egon Schiele (Austrian, b. 1890 - d. 1918)
The tragic and moody creator, Egon Schiele, is on our Vienna Secession honorable mentions list because he was only 7 years old when the Secession took place and therefore did not partake of this art movement. Though incredibly young when the Secession was founded, Schiele was heavily influenced by the Secession artists and applauded their break from tradition. We won’t get too into Schiele here, but what I’ll say about his artwork is that it is haunting because, from what I can glean, he depicted humans in their most raw and honest forms. It’s tough to view his work because they’re our ultimate mirrors.
Why you should care
Other than making for good dinner party chat should you find yourself sat between two pedantic, well traveled artsy-type people, this is good stuff to know for those who like to travel or study art. It’s especially important to know a little something about the artists of the Vienna Secession if you’re vaguely interested in Gustav Klimt, the 2015 film Woman in Gold, or Austrian history on the whole. Why? Because you can’t understand an artist’s work if you don’t know their story or at least the story of where and in what social and political climate said art work was created. Additionally, you can’t understand a city, in this example, Vienna, without considering its history, people and why it looks the way it does. You wouldn’t go on a first date and never ask the person sitting across from you where they are from, would you?