More resignations followed over the course of the next two years, including Hoffmann, Kurzweil and ending with Otto Wagner on October 11, 1899. Two days later, an official letter of resignation was sent to the Kunstlerhaus announcing the resignation of twelve member artists including Stor, Olbrich, Moser, Carl Moll, and Felician von Myrbach. The group had in fact intended to stay in the Kunstlerhaus, but on May 22 nd the board of directors put forth a motion of censure against the new group during their assembly forcing Klimt and the group to leave the meeting in silence. Of a total of 40 members on the list, 23 were members of the Kuntslerhaus, including Klimt, Joseph Olbrich and Koloman Moser. On April 3, 1897, a letter was put forth to the Kunstlerhaus announcing the formation of a new group with Klimt as president and Rudolf von Alt as honorary president. It was only natural then that it would be Klimt, an artist at the peak of his fame, who should assume the leadership of the new movement. His panel paintings on the Burgtheatre theatre in 1887 won him the Emperor’s prize in 1890 making him the favourite child of bourgeois Ringstrasse culture. Klimt was by then the most recognized of the breakaway artists, having risen to fame as decorator during the great building boom of the Ringstrasse. Led by Klimt, they decided to form a new society based on the models of the Berlin and Munich Secession founded by Franz von Stuck in 1892. In November 1896, the arch-conservative Eugeen Felix was re-elected as president of the Kunstlerhaus and the members of the organization, many of whom had been excluded from exhibitions in the past, took the opportunity to voice their opposition. Even Gustav Klimt who had by then risen to fame as a decorator for Ringstrasse buildings, began to visit the Siebener Club. While the Hagenbund tended more towards naturalism and the Siebener Club towards stylization, both groups shared a commitment to new art and a frustration at what they saw as a stagnation of the arts by the Academy and the Kunstlerhaus. Café Sperl became the home of the Siebener Club (Club of Seven) formed in 1894-95 which included Koloman Moser, Max Kurzweil, Leo Kainradl, and the young architects Josef Hoffmann and Josef Olbrich. The ‘Blaues Freihaus’ became the home the ‘Hagengesalleschaft’ or Hagendbund and it’s members included many future Secessionists: Adolf Bohm, Josef Engelhart, Alfred Roller, Friedrich Konig and Ernst Stohr. Eventually these meetings would result in the forming of two informal art societies. Modern-thinking artists in Kunstlerhaus began to meet regularly at either the Café Zum Blauen Freihaus or in the Café Sperl in order to exchange ideas and discuss the work of new artists like Meissonnier and Puvis de Chavannes in France. In this juried selection, it was not uncommon that impressionist and modernist works were rejected in favour of the prevalent naturalism of academic painting. Any established artist at the time belonged to the Kunstlerhaus and each year their work was either selected or rejected for public exhibitions. One of the earliest Ringstrasse buildings, the Kunstlerhaus was designed in the style of an Italian Renaissance villa and it became Vienna’s main exhibition hall often under the presidency of conservative bureaucrats. Two principle institutions dominated the Visual Arts in the years prior to the secession : The Akademie de bildende Kunste (the Academy of fine arts) and the Kunstlerhaus Genessenschaft – a private exhibiting society founded in 1861. It would be the new exhibition hall for the Vienna Secession built by Joseph Olbrich and above it’s door a motto for the age: “To every age its art, to every art its freedom”. Eventually a new building unlike anything ever seen would appear just off the Ringstrasse signalling a rejection of historicism. It is in this environment that the first seeds of the Secession movement began to germinate, led by a group of artists who searched for a synthesis of the arts and a place where their new works could be exhibited. There was a Neo-Greek parliament, a gothic City Hall, Neo-Baroque apartment buildings and most importantly only two exhibition bodies favouring classical-style art. Labelled as a ‘Potemkin City’ in the Secession magazine ‘Ver Sacrum’, the Ringstrasse came to symbolize the stifling attitude towards the arts that predominated in a society content with recycling classical styles rather than embracing the new modernist styles that were budding in the rest of Europe. Take a stroll along the Ringstrasse today the former location of Vienna’s city walls, and one finds a pastiche of 18th century neo-classical architecture built mostly as a showcase for the grandeur of the Habsburg Empire.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |