Vienna Secession

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The secession building at Vienna, built in 1897 by Joseph Maria Olbrich for exhibitions of the secession group

Another view of the secession building that allows better examination of the dome

The Vienna Secession or (also known as Secessionsstil, or Sezessionsstil in Austria) was part of that highly varied movement that is now covered by the general term Art Nouveau. It was formed in 1897 by a group of 19 Vienna artists who had resigned from the Association. The first President was Gustav Klimt.

Contents

1 Style of the Secessionists
2 Other Secession artists
3 Sources
4 External links

Style of the Secessionists

Unlike other movements, there is no one style that unites the work of all artists who were part of the Vienna Secession. The Secession building could be considered the icon of the movement. Above its entrance was carved the phrase "to every age its art and to art its freedom". Secession artists were concerned, above all else, with exploring the possibilities of art outside the confines of academic tradition. They hoped to create a new style that owed nothing to historical influence. In this way they were very much in keeping with the iconoclastic spirit of turn-of-the-century Vienna (the time and place that also saw the publication of Freud's first writings).

The Secessionist style was exhibited in a magazine that the group produced, called "Ver Sacrum", which featured highly decorative works representative of the Art Deco period.

Secessionist architects often decorated the surface of their buildings with linear ornamentation in a form commonly called whiplash or eel style. Otto Wagner's Majolika Haus in Vienna (c. 1898) is a significant example of the Austrian use of line.

Otto Wagner's way of modifying Art Nouveau decoration in a classical manner did not find favour with some of his pupils who broke away to form the Secessionists. One was Josef Hoffmann who left to form the Wiener Werkstätte, an Austrian equivalent of the Arts and Crafts Movement. A good example of his work is the Stoclet House in Brussels (1905).

Other Secession artists

Sources

Schorske, Carl E. "Gustav Klimt: Painting and the Crisis of the Liberal Ego" in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture. Vintage Books, 1981. ISBN 0394744780

External links

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