With the establishment of the Vienna Secession in 1897, painting in Vienna began a journey of radical change and inventiveness.

The early years of the Secession were dominated by Gustav Klimt’s ambitious, controversial paintings, which underwent an extraordinary transition during this time.

The contrast between Klimt’s detailed rendering of the Old Burgtheater interior in 1882 and his compelling ceiling paintings made for Vienna University some ten years later is breath-taking. Similarly, his Beethoven Frieze (1901–1902) with its use of dark and strange symbolism demonstrates Klimt’s evolving style.

After the split in the Secession in 1905, Klimt (with Josef Hoffmann) organised two Kunstschau (art shows) in 1908 and 1909. These marked a turning point in Viennese art, launching the next generation of artists including Oskar Kokoschka, a painter of dramatic expressive power.

The second Kunstschau featured many of Europe’s important avant-garde painters such as Gauguin, van Gogh, Munch and Matisse. It was also where the young artist Egon Schiele made his debut. Though his debt to Klimt was evident, Schiele soon established his own vision and brought to Viennese art a startling and frank confrontation with sex and the self.

“There is nothing special about me. I am a painter who paints day after day from morning to night …Who ever wants to know something about me … ought to look carefully at my pictures.” – Gustav Klimt

Gustav Klimt was born in Baumgarten, near Vienna, the son of a metal engraver and one of seven children.

From 1876, Gustav and his brother Ernst studied decorative and applied arts at Vienna’s School of Arts and Crafts where they and were trained in a conventional, academic style.

Public commissions

After graduating in 1883, the Klimt brothers and fellow student Franz Matsch formed The Painters’ Company and attracted several commissions to decorate theatre interiors, including the new Burgtheater in Vienna.

Under Imperial patronage, Gustav Klimt continued to execute important public commissions and in 1888, aged 26, won the Emperor’s prize for his painting of the Old Burgtheater.

The commission to create ceiling paintings for Vienna University’s faculties of Medicine, Jurisprudence and Philosophy resulted in a significant shift in Klimt’s art from his traditional history and salon paintings to a more personal vision. These mural-sized allegorical paintings – idiosyncratic in their symbolism, enigmatic and confronting – were rejected by the university, creating a public scandal.

Secession years

In 1897, Klimt became one of the founding members and president of the Vienna Secession, a group of artists, architects and designers who became synonymous with modern Viennese style.

During this period, Klimt completed the Beethoven Frieze, which was critically attacked following its exhibition in 1902. Klimt consequently withdrew from public commissions and relied on private patronage, mainly painting portraits of wealthy Jewish Viennese women.

Klimt is believed to have had sexual liaisons with many of the women whose portraits he painted, as well as with his models (he fathered at least 14 illegitimate children) while remaining in a life-long relationship with fashion designer Emily Flöge.

Flöge was vital to many of the decorative elements in Klimt’s art – his collaboration in the designs of her Reform dress inspired elements in his paintings. And each summer his landscape paintings where made while holidaying with Flöge and her family.

‘Golden’ paintings

Klimt’s travels to Ravenna, Italy, in 1903 ushered in his signature ‘golden’ style of paintings, though he continued to work on allegorical paintings, predominantly on the theme of the ‘Eternal Feminine’.

In 1905, Klimt left the Secession but remained instrumental in organising two major exhibitions of contemporary Viennese art and design in 1908 and 1909 (his own especially in the first of these Kunstschau or art shows) and brought the work of major European artists to Vienna.

Evolving style

Klimt’s style gradually changed, in part due to the influence of artists such as Egon Schiele and the Expressionist movement, and his later paintings are more naturalistic and freely painted. He also established a reputation for his elegant, erotic drawings.

In his erotic drawings and paintings, Egon Schiele confronted the taboos governing the display of nakedness and sex. Indeed, it has been said of both Schiele and Klimt that they restored genitalia to the genre of the Nude.

Egon Schiele was born in the Austrian town of Tulln where his father was station master. One of seven children, Schiele was the only surviving boy among three sisters. His father died of syphilis, insane, when Egon was 14.

Schiele drew obsessively as a child and went on to study in Vienna at the School of Arts and Crafts and the Academy. At the Academy he was discovered by artist Gustav Klimt who invited him to exhibit work in the 1909 Kunstschau (art show) where he saw works by Edvard Munch and Vincent van Gogh (both of whom became important influences).

Still barely out of adolescence himself, Schiele depicted the body – the female body especially – with the direct, almost mechanical curiosity of an adolescent. He scandalised audiences by depicting taboo subjects such as masturbation and lesbian love in painting and drawing, subjects previously reserved for the clandestine pornographic market.

‘Erotic’ art

Schiele invested his depiction of naked girls and women with an intensity that bordered on the neurotic and narcissistic, but equally was loaded with existential angst. Schiele’s ‘erotic’ drawings and paintings seem to stress a solitary and isolated experience of sex for both males and females. In this sense his art can be seen as one of modern neurosis.

This feeling is emphasised by the awkward gestures and poses of his figures – their splayed hands, their taught bodies – and the nervous, agitated quality of line.

Schiele’s subjects

Schiele painted somewhat claustrophobic townscapes and brooding, evocative landscapes that often seem to portend death. His response to seeing van Gogh’s work resulted in paintings of sunflowers and the direct homage The artist’s room at Neulengbach from 1911.

However portraiture, especially self-portraiture, dominated his work. His self-portraits focus on the condition of his inner life rather than his outward appearance. Similarly, his portraits capture the intensity and essence of each sitter’s presence and persona.

‘Scandalous’ lifestyle

Schiele is also known for the scandal surrounding his lifestyle and drawings. His habit of inviting street urchins into his studio to model for him drew the disapproval of the local townsfolk.

In what is known as the Neulengbach Affair, Schiele was arrested, imprisoned and charged with seduction of a minor. The charge was later dropped but police collected about 100 drawings from his studio and he was convicted of displaying erotic drawings to children.

The experience was devastating for Schiele, who protested: ‘The adults – have they forgotten how corrupt they themselves were, how attracted and excited by sex when they were children?’

At least one of the offending drawings was publicly burned in court and Schiele spent 21 days in prison. In 1918, along with his young wife, Schiele died of the Spanish flu; he was only 28 years old.

Oskar Kokoschka was both a writer of revolutionary plays and literature and an artist, but he is best known outside Central Europe for his turbulent, expressive paintings and for his tempestuous affair with Alma Mahler, widow of the great composer Gustav Mahler.

Oskar Kokoschka was born in 1886 in the Austrian Melk, and trained at the School of Arts and Crafts in Vienna from where he joined the Wiener Werstätte (Vienna Workshop), initially illustrating and designing books and working with the graphic arts. It was there that the architect and critic Adolf Loos discovered him and became his mentor and patron.

In the second Kunstschau (art show) in Vienna in 1909, Kokoschka produced his controversial, anarchic play Murder, the Hope of Women challenging bourgeois morality and gender assumptions. His art at this time incorporated folkloric imagery from the wide reach of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Psychological portraits

With Loos’s encouragement, he began to make portraits of Viennese and European notables. Of great originality and dramatic power, these portraits focused on the interior life of the individual, in keeping with the strongly Viennese preoccupation with the psyche at that time. Kokoschka achieved this though an intensely animated and ‘raw’, almost violent application of paint, his wild brushstrokes conjuring the strength and vigour of the sitter’s inner life. His figures often seem to be emerging from or disappearing into a vortex of paint.

Kokoschka and Alma Mahler

Kokoschka’s passionate affair with Alma Mahler ended when she left him to marry the architect Walter Gropius. He never recovered from this rejection and even went so far as to have a life-sized doll made of her, taking it motoring with him into the country, though eventually he destroyed it.

Alma, whom he continued to love all his life, inspired his most celebrate painting, The Tempest or The Bride of the Wind, a vivid allegorical rendering of the passionate lovers.

A great Expressionist

Kokoschka’s art was deemed degenerate by Hitler’s Nazi Party and he was forced to flee Europe, living for a time in England and the United States. Along with the German artist Max Beckmann, he is regarded as the greatest twentieth century Expressionist artist – both idiosyncratic and original.

One of the most prodigious and versatile of the remarkable group of artists and designers who founded and shaped the Secession movement and the Wiener Werkstätte, Moser brought to his designing the training and temperament of an artist. He excelled in interior and exhibition design, applied arts, graphic design and, finally, as a painter.

Moser was born in Vienna and studied at both the Viennese Academy (where he studying under highly respected but conservative painters) and the School of Arts and Crafts. In the early years of the Secession he was a major force determining the design and content of its ground-breaking journal Ver Sacrum. Its lively and stylish graphic design became a model for graphic design internationally.

Vision and Initiative

One of the founders of the Secession in 1897, in 1903, together with his colleague, Josef Hoffman, and the financier Fritz Waerndorfer, Moser established the Wiener Werkstätte. A tireless organizer and innovator, there was no area of the Vienna Workshop’s production to which he did not contribute. He also travelled widely in Europe and was alert to contemporary movements in all the arts.

Innovation and Flexibility

Between 1901-2 he created a portfolio of designs titled Flächenschmuck which were intended to be adapted for flat-surface production such as floor coverings,textiles and wallpapers. His designs, at first close in spirit to Art Nouveau arabesques and floral motifs, show an increasing shift towards a more restrained and formal aesthetic, inspired by Japanese textile patterns and designs. These designs stayed in production for many years – a measure of their success and versatility.

A versatile, creative achiever

His outstanding achievements number the stained glass windows and of Wagner’s Steinhof Church (1904), his influence on Graphic design at the beginning of the twentieth century and his elegant and severely geometric metalwork and furniture designs in which cubic form presides as a functionalist aesthetic. His use of colour – especially in glassware – was unexpected and radical. Together with Hoffmann he also worked on the interior design and furniture for the Purkersdorf Sanitarioum fulfilling the Secession’s Gesamstwerk principle. He even designed distinctively Secession-style postage stamps and Reform dresses for his wife. Moser’s was an inspired, inherently creative genius.

Return to Painting

Internal conflicts within both the Secession in 1905 and the Wiener Werkstätte in 1907 caused him to withdraw from both institutions, following which he returned to painting.

At first, influenced by the Swiss artist Ferdinand Hodler’s strangely mystical landscapes, Moser made a series of spare, yet beautifully observed paintings of the Austrian Alps, simplifying composition and naturalistic detail and heightening colour in the service of a cosmic stillness. In the last few years of his shortened life (he died of cancer aged 50) he concentrated on monumental figurative images that exemplify the Vitalist philosophy of Idealized man then sweeping much of Europe.

The Vienna Secession was the name given to the group of artists, architects and designers that broke away from the main establishment of Viennese artists to form their own group. Formed in 1897, its radical period was brief yet its impact on the cultural life of Vienna and beyond was immense and enduring.

This group aimed to create new, progressive art, to bring contemporary international art to Viennese audiences and to provide a forum for the discussion and distribution of new ideas about art and culture.

The Secessionists – among them Gustav Klimt, Koloman Moser, Josef Hoffmann, Joseph Maria Olbrich and Alfred Roller – were united by a shared desire to integrate art into all aspects of life. They aimed to bring purer forms to art and design and to make a separation from the historical styles of the past. They viewed all forms of art and craft as having equal status and aspired to the Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) that encompassed all aspects of the visual environment.

The Vienna Secession was not characterised by one single style but was linked closely with Jugendstil – literally ‘youth style’, the German-speaking world’s adaptation of Art Nouveau. Art Nouveau was an international art movement that was characterised by its use of flowing curved lines and plant forms. Viennese Jugendstil evolved over time to incorporate greater emphasis on simplified forms and geometric motifs.

In forging a new direction of artistic expression, Secession artists looked to other schools of artistic thought for inspiration. The Secession itself became a catalyst for inviting foreign artists to exhibit in Vienna, including artists from Great Britain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands.

The first issue of the Secession’s journal Ver Sacrum (Sacred Spring) published in January 1898 declared:

‘We desire an art not enslaved to foreigners, but at the same time without fear or hatred of the foreign. The art of abroad should act upon us as an incentive to reflect upon ourselves; we want to recognise it, admire it, if it deserves our admiration; all we do not want to do is imitate it.’

In this spirit of internationalism, the Secessionists proceeded to showcase works by major European artists and designers at their exhibitions, among them Vincent van Gogh, Aubrey Beardsley, Edvard Munch, Odilon Redon Max Klinger, as well as works by American artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler. The Secessionists also presented their own work within this dynamic international context.

Glasgow Four

In 1900, the Secession’s eighth exhibition was devoted entirely to exploring contemporary trends in the applied arts. Several foreign artists were invited to exhibit including the ‘Glasgow Four’: Charles Rennie Mackintosh, his wife Margaret Macdonald, and Herbert and Frances McNair.

Mackintosh’s stylised art nouveau furniture, a mix of geometric and tightly controlled sinuous forms, had a significant influence on the Secessionists, particularly architect and designer Josef Hoffmann and artist and designer Koloman Moser.

Charles Robert Ashbee

English designer Charles Robert Ashbee also participated in the exhibition, his display of 53 works forming the second largest exhibit.

Ashbee’s London Guild of Handicraft, established in 1888, had a seminal influence on Secession designers who admired its ideals of truth to materials and hand-craftsmanship that afforded equal status to the craftsman and designer.

Its emphasis on close collaboration between artists and designers, a collaboration supported by the English Arts and Crafts Movement more broadly, influenced the intensely decorative evolution of the Viennese Secession.

Beyond Europe

Viennese artists also sought out non-Western art for inspiration. Fashion designer Emilie Flöge collected exotic textiles while her life-long companion, artist Gustav Klimt, went to Ravenna, Italy, in 1903 to study Byzantine mosaics. Klimt also studied Russian icons and owned a collection of Asian and African artefacts. The Secession exhibition devoted to Japanese Art in 1900 continued to exert a powerful influence for both artists and designers.

Home-grown influences

Artists also looked to the vast ethnographic resources of the Austro-Hungarian Empire for inspiration, particularly native folk art, which they could see in Viennese museums. Likewise the inheritance of early nineteenth century Biedermeier furniture, hand crafted, uncluttered and thought to be bourgeois, was inspirational for furniture design.

In the eyes of Vienna’s citizens, Joseph Maria Olbrich’s Secession building rose like some strange apparition on the edge of the market place. Opened in October 1898, this purpose-built exhibition hall – a temple to art – was unlike anything else in the rapidly changing city.

Olbrich’s design was constructed in less than a year, its monumental white cubic form relieved by an extravagant gilded dome of 3,000 laurel leaves symbolising victory, dignity and purity.

The building attracted much attention and numerous nick-names including ‘the Golden Cabbage’ inspired by its glittering laurel leaves echoing in fantastical splendour its name-sake vegetable in the adjacent market place.

To the age its art…

Embossed in gold lettering above the pavilion’s entrance is the Secessionists’ motto: To the age its art. To art its freedom. Golden trees and Medusa heads also adorn the entrance and laurel garlands embellish the plain exterior walls.

The interior is based on a Roman Basilica and has a large central hall, two side halls and a vaulted glass roof allowing daylight to illuminate the spaces.

Secession exhibitions

The Secession building hosted a busy exhibition schedule (by 1902 it had staged 13 exhibitions) introducing Viennese audiences to works by foreign artists such as the French Impressionists as well as exquisitely designed items made by local craftsmen and designers more fully realising the Secession’s ambition to integrate the arts and crafts.

Beethoven Frieze

Perhaps the most famous show was the fourteenth exhibition dedicated to Vienna’s beloved composer Ludwig van Beethoven who embodied the notion of genius for the Viennese public and artistic community.

Hoffmann designed the galleries for the show, which featured Max Klinger’s over life-sized sculpture of Beethoven in the central hall. In an adjacent gallery, Gustav Klimt’s 34 metre-long frescoed frieze was both a homage to Beethoven’s Ode to Joy from the fourth movement of his 9th Symphony and an allegory of humanity’s redemption through the arts.

The frieze’s narrative depicts the journey of Man and Woman through the wilderness of human degradation. In the central panel, they encounter the forces of darkness in which evil is personified by the ancient mythological beast Typhoeus (depicted as part gorilla, part snake and part bird) echoing the shock of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. Women represent the symbolic figures of lewdness, lust and excess.

Though resolution comes to mankind (the couple is rescued by the knight in armour) its manifestation is ultimately more erotic than the embrace of universal love intended by Schiller’s poem and Beethoven’s setting of it.

Total work of art

The Beethoven Frieze celebrates the victory of the human spirit through painting, sculpture, music and poetry in Klimt’s realisation of the Secessionist ideal of Gesamtkunstwerk (the total work of art).

In the late nineteenth century, Vienna transformed itself from a city of historicism to a city of modernism.

Vienna went through an enormous period of growth in the second half on the nineteenth century as its medieval walls were demolished to open the city to new development.

A growing Vienna demanded new buildings, both public and private. On the site of the old walls, the Viennese built a circular boulevard – the Ringstrasse – to construct major civic buildings reflecting the grandeur and opulence of the Empire. The architecture employed styles of the past – Gothic, Baroque or Neo Classical – depending on the building’s intended purpose.

Yet by the end of the nineteenth century, these ostentatious, historicised buildings seemed out of date and many thought a new architecture was needed to embody the changing character of Viennese society. It was also essential to adapt the city’s architecture to new, larger dimensions to accommodate Vienna’s growing population; by 1900 Vienna had become Europe’s fourth-largest city after London, Paris and Berlin.

Architect Otto Wagner was the right man in the right place at the right time, and integral to Vienna’s transformation form a city of historicism to a city of modernism.

In his 1895 book Modern Architecture, Wagner expressed his view that modern architectural design should be based on the requirements of function and therefore of modern life. The new architecture was a reaction to the excessive decoration and ornamentation of the past. Its expressive strength would come from the function and construction and the character of the materials used.

As a professor of architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Wagner was well placed to champion these artistic ideas and his style of modernism, influencing an entirely new generation of architects.

This new generation, among them Adolf Loos, Josef Hoffmann and Joseph Maria Olbrich, strove to create buildings that represented the modern age. Their work laid the foundations for future movements such as Art Deco and the architecture of the twentieth century.

Josef Hoffmann was one of Austria’s most important architects and designers, and was central to the development of art and design in Vienna. He was its driving force.

Josef Hoffmann was born in Brünn (now Brno in the Czech Republic) where he studied at the State Crafts School before going on to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. There he studied with architect Otto Wagner and won the coveted Prix de Rome in 1895. While working in Wagner’s office he met architect Joseph Maria Olbrich and – together with artists Gustav Klimt and Koloman Moser – they established the Vienna Secession.

Hoffmann was extremely versatile and worked closely with artists, designing exhibition spaces and directing the installation of works. He also invited internationally established designers and architects to exhibit in Vienna, including Scotsman Charles Rennie Mackintosh whose work was to become highly influential on the Secessionists, particularly Hoffmann and Moser.

Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshop)
Hoffmann’s contribution to the development of the arts in Vienna is inestimable. Together with Moser and industrialist Fritz Wärndorfer, he established the Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshop), a progressive alliance of artists and designers linked to the Vienna Secession. It was formally registered as a company in 1903, with Hoffmann its first artistic director, and operated until 1932.

Influential furniture designs

One of the major designers for the Wiener Werkstätte, Hoffmann produced a significant number of designs, some of which are still in production such as the Rundes Modell cutlery set manufactured by Alessi and the iconic Kubus armchair whose geometric lines and cubic form have become a prototype for modern designer armchairs. His Sitzmaschine is equally famous. Hoffmann’s celebrated furniture for the Gallia apartment is now part of the NGV’s collection.

Architect, critic and theorist – Adolf Loos was a vital and contrary force in the evolution of architecture in Vienna in the early twentieth century. His belief in functionality and objectivity proved critical to modern architecture.

Adolf Loos was born in Brünn in Moravia (now the Czech Republic) in 1870. After completing the State Crafts School in Brünn and further studies in Dresden, Loos visited America where he was influenced by Louis Sullivan’s architecture in Chicago.

Ornament and crime

On his return to Vienna, Loos became one of the chief proponents of functionalist architecture, whose first legacy was the Bauhaus, and documented his views on architecture, design and modernity among others in his now famous essay and manifesto ‘Ornament and crime’ (1908).

As the manifesto’s title suggests, Loos was highly critical of a decorative approach to architecture and design and publicly derided the work of those who favoured such an approach, among them architect designer Josef Hoffmann and artist Gustav Klimt.

Loos was also opposed to the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) as well as the ‘dictatorial’ attitude of architect designers who determined every detail of the domestic dwelling as well as its furnishings and decoration (which he believed, with some justification, was exemplified by Hoffmann). The designers’ differing approaches are clearly evident in the contrast between Hoffmann’s Gallia apartment and Loos’s Langer apartment.

Alternative modernist design

Loos expounded an alternative approach to modernist design, placing the individual and their need to live ‘in a modern way’ at the centre of architecture. For Loos, ‘the house did not belong to art because the house must please everyone, unlike a work of art, which does not need to please anyone.’

Yet his own buildings were not to everyone’s liking. The severity of his apartment building at Michaelerplatz provoked such resentment from the Viennese bourgeoisie (it was said to look like a face without eyebrows!) that he was made to install flower boxes to soften its façade.

Born in Vienna and educated in Vienna and Berlin, Otto Wagner was in many ways the father of modern architecture in Vienna. The buildings he designed determined the appearance of Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century.

Vienna’s chief architect

Otto Wagner was the chief architect for much of the rebuilding of Vienna in the latter part of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century – during which time he became increasingly radical in his approach.

He was responsible for major buildings in Vienna from the late 1870s, but also for projects that we would now define as engineering and urban planning. He designed the urban railway network, its bridges and handsomerailway stations, a new city plan (which, though influential, was not implemented) and canal system containing the River Danube.

While his early buildings looked back to previous centuries in their historical references, by the late 1890s he had embraced the new European style of Art Nouveau (called Jugendstil – or Youth style – in German-speaking countries).

Radical architecture

In 1894, Wagner was appointed Professor of Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, where he gathered students to the cause of a reforming, radical architecture. His 1896 textbook Modern Architecture calls for a changed philosophy: ‘New human tasks and views called for a change or reconstitution of existing forms’. This philosophy became increasingly evident in his buildings.

‘The boundless evil, caused by shoddy mass-produced goods and by the uncritical imitation of earlier styles, is like a tidal wave sweeping across the world.’

So wrote architect and designer Josef Hoffmann, who in 1905 penned the Prospectus for the Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshop) , a progressive alliance of artists, designers and craftsmen who fundamentally shaped the development of the arts in early twentieth century Vienna.

Hoffmann, along with artist and designer Koloman Moser, was the major force behind the founding of the Werkstätte. His aspirations for art and design as outlined in the Prospectus offer a wonderful insight into the development of decorative arts in Vienna at this time. The Prospectus continues:

‘We wish to create an inner relationship linking public, designer and worker and we want to produce good and simple articles of everyday use. Our guiding principle is function, utility our first condition, and our strength must lie in good proportions and the proper treatment of material.

We shall seek to decorate when it seems required but we do not feel obliged to adorn at any price.

We shall use many semi-precious stones, especially in our jewellery, because in our eyes their manifold colours and ever-varying facets replace the sparkle of diamonds.

The Viennese Secession’s aim to unite the fine arts of painting, sculpture and architecture with the applied arts, and treat them of equal value, found its logical conclusion in the formation of a cooperative where designers and craftsmen could work as equals, produce and manufacture items – often on commission – and develop a loyal clientele.

In 1903, two of the founding members of the Vienna Secession, architect and designer Josef Hoffmann and artist and designer Koloman Moser, with financial support from the Jewish textile industrialist Fritz Wärndorfer, set up a production cooperative of craftsmen called the Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshop).

English inspiration

The Wiener Werkstätte was inspired by the English designer Charles Robert Ashbee’s Guild of Handicraft, an association of craftsmen and designers established in London in 1888, which was based on socio-economic considerations. In creating their own cooperative, Hoffmann and Moser aimed to establish an infrastructure that allowed them to execute their designs without an intermediary, in direct contact with the craftsmen, in an exceptionally creative and experimental atmosphere.

Many workshops from this period, such as those in England, aimed to bring the best of traditional workmanship to a mass market. The Wiener Werkstätte concentrated on good design for a more affluent clientele. Hoffman said, ‘Since it is not possible to work for the whole market, we will concentrate on those who can afford it.’

Modern style

Designs for the Wiener Werkstätte were produced across a range of materials including wood, glass, metal, ceramics and textiles. Artisans worked with designers to produce work that embodied the qualities of good design and excellent craftsmanship, using the best materials.

The Wiener Werkstätte became a testing ground for the development of the so-called ‘modern’ style. Based on the Secession’s ideal of the unity of the arts, the Wiener Werkstätte played a decisive role in the refinement and stylistic development of the interior space as a Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art), an approach to modern living and decoration that parallels contemporary notions of ‘lifestyle’, though in a more doctrinaire manner.

Under the leadership of Hoffmann, the Wiener Werkstätte was responsible for the design of two major buildings: the Sanatorium at Purkersdorf near Vienna and the Palais Stoclet in Brussels. Gustav Klimt designed the mosaic frieze for the dining room of the Palais Stoclet.

In the ensuing years, many designers and craftsmen, trained at the School of Arts and Crafts in Vienna, followed their teachers Hoffmann and Moser across to the new enterprise which operated until 1932.

Today, most of the Gallia apartment’s contents reside in the National Gallery of Victoria and represent one of the most intact collections of Josef Hoffmann’s design work in the world.

Like many wealthy Jewish families, Moriz and Hermine Gallia were patrons of the arts and supporters of new movements in art and design, including the Vienna Secession and the Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshop).

Moriz had made his wealth in the gaslight and electricity industry and was a director of the Auer Gaslight Company.

A new home

In 1910, Moriz Gallia acquired a building that was to be the site for his future family home. He demolished the premises and in its place constructed a new building of five storeys, an attic and a basement. The family’s apartment was located on the first floor. The remainder of the floors were let, with the hope that their children would one day occupy them.

Commissioning Hoffmann

In 1912, Moriz Gallia commissioned architect and designer Josef Hoffmann to design five rooms for the family’s new apartment: the hall, salon, smoking room, dining room and boudoir.

Hoffmann’s designs included the furniture, both built-in and free-standing, the plasterwork, the woodwork, light fittings, wall coverings and floor coverings. He also supervised the making of all aspects of his designs by specially selected craftspeople.

The boudoir was the room in which Hermine Gallia entertained her friends. White painted wood, gilded detail and tapered legs gave the boudoir furniture a sense of lightness and refinement. In contrast, the furniture for the hall was made from ebonised (black-stained) wood, the darkness of the wood, its solid, square design, and the vertical fluting giving the furniture a monumental quality.

Classical design, decorative aesthetic

When Hoffmann undertook work on the Gallia apartment he was already an established architect, having completed commissions for both the Purkersdorf Sanatorium in Vienna and the Palais Stoclet in Brussels. His work at this time had entered a Neo-Classical phase, combining Classical design elements with a richly decorative aesthetic.

Emigration to Australia

The Gallia family lived in the apartment for 23 years. Moriz Gallia died in 1918 and by the time Hermine died in 1936 the children had all moved into their own apartments in different parts of Vienna. The contents of the Hoffmann rooms were divided between them.

Before the Second World War, like many Jewish families, the Gallias were forced to flee Austria. They emigrated to Australia, taking all their household belongings with them. Much of the apartment’s contents, including furniture, carpets, glass and silverwork were eventually acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria, as well as a portrait of the Gallia children by Ferdinand Andri. The portrait of Hermine Gallia by Gustav Klimt was purchased by the National Gallery in London.

Vienna has long held a pre-eminent place in Europe’s musical life, being home to the musical giants Joseph Haydn (1732–1809), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791), Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827), Franz Schubert (1797–1828), Johannes Brahms (1833–1897), Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) and Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951).

Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, occasionally designated as the First Viennese School, belong to the Classical period in Western music, which extends from the early to mid eighteenth century into the early nineteenth.

Yet the term ‘First Viennese School’ is misleading – strictly speaking there wasn’t one. While Mozart and Haydn knew and admired one another (and there was much cross-pollination of musical ideas and invention) and Beethoven took lessons in composition with Haydn for a shorttime, they were all independent of one another.

While Beethoven straddles the Classical and Romantic periods, Brahms and Schubert, the ‘inventor’ of the Romantic Lied, are central to the Romanticism of the nineteenth century. Mahler stands as one of the great late Romantic composers while pointing the way to modernism in the twentieth century.

Schubert was the only one of these composers born in Vienna. Brahms, born in Hamburg, settled permanently in Vienna in 1868. He was appointed artistic director of the famed Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (Society of Music Lovers) from 1872 to 1875, introducing the Viennese to some of the great baroque music of Bach and Handel.

From mid century, Vienna was in the grip of the Viennese waltz which found its greatest expression through Johann Strauss II, the ‘waltz king’. His operettas were also extremely popular along with those of Lehar and Offenbach.

The Second Viennese School evolved around Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) and his two most well-known students Alban Berg and Anton Webern.

Initially the music of Schoenberg – and to some extent his pupils – used late-Romantic tonalities and chromatic expression (indeed Mahler championed Schoenberg’s music during his lifetime).

The evolution of dissonance and atonality into the twelve tone system of composition was not evident until the early 1920s, but it is the uncompromising individuality of these composers and their formal rigour that distinguishes this Second Viennese School.

The music of Gustav Mahler acts as a bridge from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, just as Beethoven’s music before him acted as a bridge from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century.

Gustav Mahler was one of 14 children born into a humble family in Bohemia (now the Czech Republic). From the age of four, his musical talent was encouraged and he was regarded as a Wunderkind.

Following his graduation from the Vienna Conservatory, Mahler conducted orchestras throughout Germany and the Empire. Eventually he converted to Catholicism (as did many Jews) to secure the Court appointment to the Hofoper (Vienna Opera House), assuming the role of artistic director in 1897.

Revolutionising opera

In his decade as the Hofoper’s supreme director, Mahler revived the great classics and revolutionised the staging with Secessionist artist Alfred Roller as his set, costumes and lighting designer, thus bringing opera into the modern era.

He also insisted on exacting standards from performers, decrying the ‘sloppiness’ of players and singers; this was openly resented, as was his ‘Jewishness’.

Mahler eventually resigned in 1907, leaving for New York to direct its Metropolitan Opera and subsequently the newly-constituted New York Philharmonic, reshaping and transforming it into a leading orchestra.

Mahler and Vienna

When Mahler left Vienna in 1907 he described his decade at the Hofoper as ‘ten war-years’. And in a letter to Mahler, fellow composer Arnold Schoenberg referred to ‘our hated and beloved Vienna’.

For it was, as Michael Kennedy writes in The Master Musicians: Mahler, ‘the city of light-hearted, easy-going, gracious living, of intrigue, callousness and spite where revolutionary ideas in art struggled for expression in a climate of conservative, sometimes reactionary, opinion.’

Artistic process

For Mahler, artistic creation – particularly the creation of his own vast and complex music – was an encounter with both natural and supernatural forces rather than a purely technical process.

While rehearsing for the premiere of his 5th Symphony, Mahler wrote to his wife: ‘That scherzo is an accursed movement! … How should [audiences] react to this chaos, which is constantly giving birth to new worlds and promptly destroying them again? What should they make of these primeval noises, this rushing, roaring, raging sea, these dancing stars, these ebbing, shimmering, gleaming waves?’

Belated recognition

Though Mahler was well received as a composer in Germany and in parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, his 9th Symphony was the only one to have a world premier in Vienna – just over a year after his death.

It was some 50 years before he was recognised as the last of Vienna’s great symphonic composers. His song cycles (Songs of the Wayfarer, Kindertotenlieder and Das Lied von der Erde) are equally revered.

Arnold Schoenberg displayed raw intellectual power in no fewer than four creative fields: musical composition, music teaching, essay-writing, and painting. As ‘father’ of the Second Viennese School, his stature as one of the most paradigm-shattering composers of all time alone places him in the highest rank.

Arnold Schoenberg was born in Vienna into a Jewish family. Although his mother was a piano teacher, Arnold was largely self-taught in music.

In his twenties, Schoenberg earned a living by orchestrating operettas, while composing his own works, and by 1911 had written his Theory of Harmony, which remains one of the most influential and radical works on the theory and language of music.

Paradigm-shattering composer

From about 1912, Schoenberg insisted that a composer should begin each new piece by re-inventing paradigms of musical thought rather than by simply introducing new melodic or harmonic ideas. This commitment aligned him with the ‘New Sobriety’ (or ‘New Objectivity’) movement in early 1920s Germany that rejected both the sentimentality of late Romanticism and the emotional agitation of Expressionism.

As his career progressed, Schoenberg continued to move further away from Classicism, Romanticism and traditional harmonic progressions, to explore music that aimed to convey the subconscious and inner life through new dissonant and atonal compositions such as Erwartung (1909) and Pierrot lunaire (1912).

Twelve-tone method of composition

After a period of experimentation in the 1920s, Schoenberg developed his method of manipulating an ordered series of the 12 notes in the chromatic scale which embraced contrapuntal techniques such as inversion of the basic tone row. Variations in melody and harmony were thus made possible. This ‘method of composition with twelve tones which are related only with one another’ profoundly influenced the development of modern techniques of composition, changing the course of classical music.

Influential teacher

Schoenberg was also one of the great music teachers of the twentieth century, first in Vienna, then in Berlin during the 1920s, and finally in Los Angeles. His pupils included Alban Berg (1885–1935) and Anton Webern (1883–1945), who became one of the best-known exponents of the twelve-tone technique.

Maverick creative force

Schoenberg’s reputation is properly that of a composer who revolutionised twentieth century music, but he was also a maverick creative force whose talent embraced many creative fields, including pictorial art.

From 1906, he studied oil painting with his friend Richard Gerstl (1883–1908), one of Vienna’s few Jewish painters (tragically Gerstl committed suicide because of a failed love affair with Schoenberg’s wife).

In 1910, Schoenberg produced more than 40 self-portraits and a remarkable portrait of his pupil Alban Berg. No other great composer ever painted his leading pupil. They constitute a remarkable body of quietly Expressionist images, unlike anything else then being produced in Vienna.

Early twentieth century Vienna was bursting with new ideas and beliefs about almost every aspect of society, including sexuality. As Sigmund Freud defined erotic obsession for a new millennium, artists such as Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele explored human sexuality in images of unparalleled and startling frankness.

The Vienna of 1900 liberated and celebrated the individual above all else. Enlightenment ideas moderated the dictates of religion, paving the way for recognition of human complexity.

Developments in science, including Darwinian Evolutionary Theory, coupled with bourgeois liberalism and the growth of a more secular society, led to a reinterpretation of the forces governing human behaviour and their expression in both science and the arts.

Sigmund Freud developed his theory of human behaviour motivated by the instinctual drives of Eros and Thanatos (sex and death). Defining the human psyche in terms of sexual gratification, he argued that neurosis and mental illness resulted from its repression.

Freud formulated the role of infant sexuality and also devised a ‘talking cure’ for psychological therapy which, in 1896, he termed psychoanalysis. Freud’s seminal work The Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1899, forged a new understanding of the unconscious mind and the psyche.

The father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist, medical doctor, psychologist and highly influential thinker of the early twentieth century.

Freud has substantially influenced how we think about human behaviour and cognitive processes. His theories of the Ego as the driving force in human nature and repression as our dominant defence mechanism are widely accepted as descriptions of the way the mind is organised.

Similarly, his argument that the sexual drive (libido) is the primary motivational force of human life is uncontested (though Freud also argued that we have an instinctual ‘death wish’). He also stressed the importance of childhood experiences as determinants of adult behaviours and pathologies.

Early life and career

Freud was born to German-speaking Jews in Feiburg, Moravia (now in the Czech Republic). He was clever scholastically and despite the family’s poverty was able to complete his schooling and enter the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Vienna.

He began medical research under a Darwinist professor, and after initially specialising in the study of cerebral palsy began practising as a neurologist. He was attracted to philosophical theories of perception and early work on the unconscious, and attentive to the ideas of influential German philosopher and writer Friedrich Nietzsche.

Development of psychoanalysis

In 1885, Freud studied in Paris with Jean-Martin Charcot, a neurologist and exponent of hypnosis in the treatment of hysteria. This was a turning point in Freud’s intellectual and professional life and initially influential in his treatment of patients.

Abandoning the use of hypnosis, Freud went on to develop his own method of encouraging his patients to talk through their psychological problems to release trauma buried (or repressed) in what he postulated as the unconscious mind. This ‘talking cure’ came to be known as Psychoanalysis. The treatment had as a central tenant the notion that the patient should ‘freely associate’, saying whatever came to mind without too much intervention from the therapist.

Throughout much of the twentieth century, Freud’s therapeutic technique of psychoanalysis and his theories about the human psyche and its psychopathologies were central to psychotherapy and the discipline of human psychology, though they became increasingly disputed.

Treatises on behaviour

Freud published his first book The Interpretation of Dreams in 1899 and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life in 1901, followed by Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in 1905. He continued to write and publish important treatises on behaviour such as Beyond the Pleasure Principle as well as essays on cultural themes.

While Freud wasinitially surrounded by a group of like-minded colleagues, of whom he expected loyalty. Dissenting voices increasingly splintered Freud’s circle and psychotherapy itself.

A secular Jew, Freud was forced to flee Vienna when Hitler’s Nazi Party annexed Austria in 1938. He died in London in 1939.

Increasing industrialisation in the nineteenth century encouraged a radical redistribution of wealth and power in Europe, resulting in a shift in class structures and gender roles. Fashion, once the preserve of the nobility and the wealthy bourgeoisie, began to find new outlets and reflect changing lifestyles.

As society industrialised, women gradually gained greater independence and urban society adopted new mechanised forms of transport. Clothing had to be adapted to suit these changed conditions. Full swirling skirts were hardly practical for city life. Andwhile bicycles, for instance, were initially viewed as an eccentric indulgence of more affluent classes, even so they necessitated a change in clothing.

Women’s garments were slowest to change (as were the conditions of their lives). The exaggerated silhouette of tiny waists and bustles endured until the early twentieth century, especially for evening gowns. These garments restricted the body (relying on corsets to create unnaturally slender waistlines) restraining movement and breathing.

Againstthis background, clothing designed by Viennese fashion designer Emily Flöge in collaboration with artist Gustav Klimt, and by the Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshop) was considered radically new and elegantly unorthodox.

Their loose, flowing garments were known as Reformkleider, the German term for artistic dress adapted from the British Arts and Crafts movement, and often featured colourful fabrics in striking graphic prints designed by the Wiener Werkstätte.

Fashion and textiles became one of the most lucrative parts of the Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshop), influencing the dress of stylish Viennese women and artists and designers abroad.

In 1905, two of the principal designers of the Wiener Werkstätte, Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser, declared in the organisation’s Prospectus that ‘it is certainly not enough to buy pictures, however splendid they may be’ and went on to list those items which ensured the proper integration of art and daily life, including the clothes the cultivated Viennese should wear. This epitomised the Secession’s ideal of Gesamtkunstwerk in which the total work of art was all-embracing.

Setting up shop

In 1910, the Wiener Werkstätte launched a dedicated fashion department under the direction of Eduard Wimmer-Wisgrill. The store catered mostly to women (who were viewed as an integral part of the home and hence to its overall design) and employed two clothing designers and some 80 artists and craftsmen to design textiles, lace, needlework, hats, bags and other fashion accessories. Often the textile designs by artists such as Koloman Moser were more avant-garde than the clothes made from them.

The Flöge sisters

Before this, the fashionable, well-to-do and liberated woman was reliant on the chic couture house Schwestern Flöge that Emily Flöge and her two sisters had opened in 1904. It was here that the loose, flowing gowns which feature in Gustav Klimt’s paintings were made, most often in fabrics designed and made by the Wiener Werkstätte.

These versatile textiles were designed to be applicable to furnishing, wall-paper, curtains and clothing. Again the Gesamtkunstwerk approach encouraged such versatile designs and uses. Many such designs were initially inspired by Japanese art and ideally suited to Emily Flöge’s Reform dresses. Both Klimt and Hoffmann directed their clients to both establishments.

Josef Hoffmann: dominant influence

Josef Hoffmann’s influence was perhaps the most dominant in the Wiener Werkstätte’s production of textiles. Not only did he design hundreds of patterns himself, but as professor at the School of Arts and Crafts, he taught many of the designers who were to find employment with the Wiener Werkstätte.

By 1910, the stark geometry of Hoffmann’s original designs had softened, incorporating the simplified motifs of leaves and flowers.

Evolving fashion trends

The First World War had a profound effect on female clothing and fashion, shortening skirts and facilitating ease of movement to accommodate the changing role of women. A revival of nationalism also aroused an interest in the folkloric themes of traditional dress, which were reflected in the designs of many garments up until the closure of the Wiener Werkstätte in 1932.

Emilie Flöge was one of Vienna’s most successful fashion stylists and designers who created bold, stunning designs for the newly and increasingly liberated ‘modern’ Viennese woman.

Like her life-long companion Gustav Klimt, Emilie Flöge came from fairly humble origins. Klimt’s glorious portrait of her at the age of 28 conveys something of her strong personality. She was born in Vienna in 1874, one of three daughters of a wood carver who specialised in fashioning the meerschaum pipes which, universally, the male population smoked at this time.

Emilie and Klimt met when the Flöge sisters sat as subjects for the painting of the old Burgtheater paintings that Gustav and his brother Ernst had been commissioned to paint. Ernst Klimt went on to marry Emilie’s sister Helene in 1891, and so the families were connected.

Successful fashion stylist and designer

As a business woman, Emilie Flöge was one of Vienna’s most successful fashion stylists and designers. In 1904, together with her sisters Pauline and Helene, she opened the couture house Schwestern Flöge (Flöge Sisters) in Casa Piccola on the Mariahilferstrasse. The couture house, with its interiors designed by Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser as a Wiener Werkstätte commission, quickly became a successful enterprise with wealthy clients who were committed to modernity in all its forms.

Rethinking women’s dress

Flöge’s familiarity with Wiener Werkstätte projects and her own eclectic love of folk costume and Japanese textiles gave her a head start when it came to rethinking women’s dress, which now linked her into the early feminist circles of Vienna.

Reform dress was a powerful new statement of revolutionary modern values. Loose, flowing and bold, it was a fashion that rejected the tight-laced bolstered style of historicist Vienna. It celebrated instead physical freedom, self-expression, closeness to nature, and the vitality of other ethnicities from within the Austro-Hungarian Empire itself to the Far East.

Perhaps too, the vogue for the liberated pagan and uninhibited dance of Isadora Duncan, whose bare feet and loose garments freed movement, was also inspirational. Reform dress was a style for the mature, self confident and articulate woman.

Schwestern Flöge – a thriving business

Schwestern Flöge was to survive and thrive for 34 years as the most progressive of Vienna’s female population made the pilgrimage to its premises. A large overlap existed between the clientele of the Wiener Werkstätte and the Schwestern Flöge. Many of Klimt’s and Hoffmann’s clients were sent to or chose to go to the sisters’ chic couture house, and until the Wiener Werkstätte opened its own fashion department in 1911, the talented trio were largely without competition.