Page 192 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

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Gustav Klimt + Kolomon Moser + Josef Hoffman (etc): The Vienna Secession 1897
The architect Otto Wagner (later to found the similarly influential Wiener Werkstatte (Vienna Studio) with Kolomon Moser was also an early member of the Vienna Secession. This team of artists, designers, architects who founded the Secession were opposed to the historicist and conservative attitudes of the official Vienna Academy (Vienna Künstlerhaus) - and looked to the revolutionary building, design and craft movements in the UK (perhaps especially the Arts and Crafts Movement, and the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Scotland) - to the influences of Japanese art and culture, and to a fresh approach to the Austro-Hungarian (eastern European) heritage - in Coptic, Slavic, Ottoman and Orthodox influences. You must remember that Vienna was the capital city of the Austrian Empire (the western part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and a great power in the Belle Epoque period), so Vienna was a centre-point of European culture, and very influential. , The Vienna Secession’s first president was the artist Gustav Klimt - one of the most radical figures in European art, and he had left his academic training behind him, as he explored new means of painting, (often with the gold-leaf and gold-paint used by his father in his craft as a gold-engraver), influenced by the orientalism, ‘Japonism’, and the Orthodox painted icons of eastern Europe. Around this time, Klimt met and fell in love with the great fashion designer and style-setter Emilie Flogue (See Emilie Flogue: Dress Designs 1904) and together they encouraged the movement to simplified, abstracted forms of modernism mentioned above. The Secession published a journal: Ver Sacrum (‘Sacred Spring’) which was the vehicle for the Secession to publicise their work, stay in touch, and feature contemporary European avant garde art. Klimt’s principle protege was his fellow Austrian, Egon Schiele. This period of art is fascinating, usually lumped together under an umbrella label of ‘art nouveau’, whereas there were several strands within this label, - in Germany and Austria this style was known as Jugendstil or Sezessionstil. There were several roots to this, including symbolist poetry, symbolist post-Impressionism - especially the paintings of Paul Gauguin, aestheticism - especially Aubrey Beardsley, the ornamentation of natural forms, the graphic posters of Toulouse-Lautrec, exaggerated graphic letterforms, sinuous organic abstraction, the graphic posters and works of Alphonse Mucha, the pure lines of Japanese Ukiyo-e prints, and the use of muted colours including mauves and ivy-greens, - all these elements together. Klimt’s lavish integration of organic pattern has an Islamic flavour, and with his lavish use of gold, also refers to the tradition of Russian and eastern European Icon painting. And the Secession emerged at the time of radical art experimentation - the final paintings of Van Gogh, the work of Edvard Munch, Picasso’s experiments (the Blue Period begins around 1900), Matisse was experimenting with non- realist colour (the Fauves movement was in genesis), and much more besides. The Secession effectively reframed and recast the fine arts in Vienna, and in 1903 spurred several of the secessionist artists and craftsmen, led by Kolomon Moser and Josef Hoffman, to form the Wiener Werkstatte in order to reform the ‘applied arts’.