Soon, however, the creative avant-garde embraced a more restrained, geometric style, as practiced by Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Glasgow and Frank Lloyd Wright in the U.S. At first, organic twists and naturalistic twirls so characteristic of German Jugendstil and French and Belgian Art Nouveau also prospered in the Habsburg city.
The reform movement created a forum to question tradition through the display and debate of modern aesthetics, and within its first two years-thanks to financial backing from steel magnate Karl Wittgenstein (the father of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein)-had established an exhibition building and the journal Ver Sacrum (“holy spring”). In response, in 1897, a group of artists bent on artistic renewal-including such illustrious figures as Gustav Klimt, Koloman Moser, and Josef Hoffmann-founded the Vienna Secession. Progressive artists and architects, in particular, felt a deep dissatisfaction with historicist solutions to the aesthetic problems that were so strikingly manifested in grand Ringstraßen architecture and on the lush canvases of academic painters like Hans Makart-but also present in the decoration of private apartments and the production of everyday consumer goods.
Vienna secession design full#
Today, the impact of this unique cultural outburst can still be experienced far beyond Austrian borders.ĭue to a comparatively late introduction to industrialization and modern consumerism, at the Fin de siècle (“end of century”), Vienna was only just beginning to grapple with the full impact of modernity in all its facets. The cultural struggle between tradition and modernity fought on Viennese soil left no artistic stage untouched, least of all the fine and decorative arts. In addition to its recognized political role during the period, the Danube capital of the early 1900s has long been celebrated for playing an instrumental part in the birth of modernism. The center of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy-where fateful decisions of war and peace were made in 1914-was a bustling multicultural metropolis at the time, and, at two million inhabitants, one of the five largest cities in the world. This year, as the centennial of the First World War draws near, Vienna at the turn of the 20th century stands squarely in the historical spotlight.