Vienna Secession

Vienna Secession

Artistic Movements, Periods and Styles in 5 Points

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Vienna Secession

• •It was part of a bigger movement: Modernism. It started in 1897, and it is considered to be the entering of Austria into modernity (in art, obviously). The first president of this association of artists was Klimt and, as we can imagine, the word “Secession” implies a break. There is a rupture with the conservative tradition.
• The Secession was founded to promote innovation in contemporary art and not to promote the development of any style in particular. As years went by, artists, forms and concepts —what art expresses— change. Trends started to “update”, and that is why there is no “Vienna Secession style.” Secession still exists and its famous building still works as an exhibition space for contemporary art. It is also a place that shows the work of its famous founding members. Nevertheless, the movement is considered to have lasted specifically until 1905 (until that moment, if we look for formal characteristics that prevail in the movement, those are the characteristics of modernism or art nouveau).
• The secession was a project of artistic renewal. A Project to develop and promote a progressive, innovative art that combined traditional arts with design, decoration and architecture. There is a concept of “total work of art” (Gesamtkunstwerk) that talks about an art that sums the skills of the other arts.
• The challenge of the artists of the Secession (the rupture with the conservatism, the provocations against the “traditional taste”), is well exemplified in a work of Klimt: Nuda Veritas (The Naked truth) of 1899. In that work there is a naked woman with a text of a poem of Schiller: “If you cannot please everyone with your actions and your art, you should satisfy a few. To please many is dangerous.”
• Another key of this movement is the phrase written at the entrance of the building of the Secession —in German, of course— that summarizes the need to move away from tradition to develop an art representative of the times: “To every age its art, to every art its freedom.”

Image: Three Ages of Woman (1905). Gustav Klimt.

Representative artists: Gustav Klimt, Koloman Mosser, Josef Hoffman, Ferdinand Andri, Josef Maria Auchentaller, Joseph Maria Olbrich (architect that designed the Pavilion of the Vienna Secession).

Recommended links:

Timeline: from Neoclassicism till the end of the 19th century.

Timeline: Moments of Gustav Klimt.

Art Nouveau.

Characteristic Elements of Art Nouveau Painting.

Gold leaf technique.

The Kiss.

Fundamental Painters of Symbolism.

The Touch of Klimt.

The Touch of Egon Schiele.

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