The book includes eye-witness accounts of exhibitions, the opening of the Secession building and other events, and the result is a fascinating documentary study of the members of an artistic movement which is much admired today. In other fields, Mahler, Freud and Schnitzler were influencing the avant-garde. Klimt, Kokoschka and Schiele were the leading figures in the fine arts Wagner, Olbrich, Loos and Hoffmann in architecture and the applied arts. Art in Vienna, 1898-1918: Klimt, Kokoschka, Schiele and their Contemporaries, now published in its 4th edition, brilliantly traces the course of this development. Their work shocked a conservative public, but their successive exhibitions, their magazine Ver Sacrum, and their application to the applied arts and architecture soon brought them an enthusiastic following and wealthy patronage. The artistic stagnation of Vienna at the end of the 19th century was rudely shaken by the artists of the Vienna Secession. When Secessionists won posts at the city’s applied arts school, The Kunstgewerbeschule, the institution was transformed from a bastion of tradition into a crucible of avant-garde creativity, where Mackintosh’s developments were admired alongside other movements from across Europe. The wealthy young patron and businessman Fritz Waerndorfer also took similar trips, and even commissioned an insignia for Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna’s Workshops), a kind of Viennese version of the Arts and Crafts Movement, which prized artisanal, Mackintosh-style skill over factory dross. In 1902, Hoffmann – creator of Austria’s Sanatorium Purkersdorf and the proto-modernist Kubus chair – travelled to Glasgow specially in order to see Mackintosh. Secessionist artists designers and architects such as Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser all went on to acknowledge some debt to the prevailing Glasgow School, created by Mackintosh and co. The Mackintosh room from the eight Secession exhibition, as reproduced in Art In TimeĬertainly, Mackintosh’s work won plaudits among its organisers.
I hope it is receiving that public recognition and support which it deserves.” In a letter dated 17 December 1900, Mackintosh thanked the committee for their kindness, stating “I know well the artistic achievement of your exhibition. This show marked the beginnings of cordial relations between the Secession and the British artists who had been invited to Vienna especially for the occasion.” “Room X of the exhibition, the layout of which was designed by Mackintosh and his wife, was set aside for their collection. “Their aim was to introduce to Vienna the work of some of the foremost designers in Europe,” writes Peter Vergo. Here’s how that work is described in our book, Art in Vienna 1898-1918.
To this end, the city’s creative class invited all sorts of new styles of expression to their city, including the Scottish architect, designer and artist Charles Rennie Mackintosh, born on this day, 7 June, in 1868.īy the turn of the century, Mackintosh had established his own distinct style, drawing together influences from Japan, the Arts and Crafts Movement, and the industrial vigour of Glasgow, the city of his birth, to create a Scottish take on Art Nouveau.Īt the eighth Secession exhibition, 3 November - 27 December 1900, Mackintosh was invited to create and display an entire room. “Eager to break – or ‘secede’ – from the conservative institutions that had dictated the direction of Austrian art for decades,” explains the text in our book Art In Time, “the artists who initiated the Vienna Secession in 1897 shared little stylistically, but were united by a desire to reinvigorate the traditions of Austria’s official academies.” However, the artists, designers and architects who founded this late 19 th and early 20 th century movement, wanted to reject local artistic traditions, rather than revel in them. Today, we picture the Viennese Secession as a distinctly Austrian development, exemplified in the paintings of Egon Schiele, and Gustav Klimt, and the architecture of Adolf Loos. From Art in Vienna How Charles Rennie Mackintosh changed the Vienna Secessionĭiscover the architect and designer's often overlooked influence on Austria’s famed art movement Koloman Moser, cover of Ver Sacrum II: iv, 1899 (picture credit: Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg).
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