Vienna Secession

Vienna Secession is the Austrian form of Art Nouveau, developed by artists and architects who broke away from Vienna's established artists' association in 1897. Buildings have flat, smooth walls, often white, with ornament confined to panels, friezes and borders. The ornament is often geometric, with squares and grids, or stylized plants such as laurel leaves and flowers, sometimes gilded. Lettering is designed as part of the facade. Later buildings reduce ornament further and expose new materials such as steel, glass, aluminum and reinforced concrete.

Joseph Maria Olbrich's Secession Building (1897-1898) has a dome of gilded metal laurel leaves over its entrance and the motto 'To every age its art, to every art its freedom.' Otto Wagner's Majolikahaus (1898-1899) is faced in flower-patterned ceramic tiles, and his Austrian Postal Savings Bank (1904-1906) has thin marble slabs held by visible bolts and a banking hall under a glass roof. French and Belgian Art Nouveau uses flowing, whiplash curves in iron and stone; the Viennese version uses straighter lines, rectangles and symmetry.

Gustav Klimt, Koloman Moser, Josef Hoffmann, Joseph Maria Olbrich, Max Kurzweil and others founded the Vienna Secession on April 3, 1897, with Klimt as its first president. The architect Otto Wagner, a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, joined shortly afterward. The group published the magazine Ver Sacrum and built the Secession Building as its exhibition hall in 1897-1898. Klimt painted his Beethoven Frieze for an exhibition there in 1902.

Wagner designed stations for Vienna's Stadtbahn railway, including the Karlsplatz pavilions (1898-1899), and the Church of St. Leopold at the Steinhof hospital (1902-1907). In 1903 Hoffmann and Moser founded the Wiener Werkstatte, a workshop producing furniture, metalwork and household objects. In 1905 Klimt, Hoffmann, Wagner and others left the Secession after a dispute over whether the decorative arts should have equal standing with painting and sculpture. Hoffmann's Stoclet Palace in Brussels (1905-1911), with flat marble walls edged in metal strips, is one of the last major works of the movement.