The Vienna Secession

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0:57around the ethics of it all. For more, listen to The Global Story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:08BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. This is In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition, you'll find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in 1897, Gustav Klimt led a group of radical artists to break free from the cultural establishment of Vienna and found a movement that became known as the Vienna Secession. In the vibrant atmosphere of coffeehouses, Freudian psychoanalysis and the music of Wagner and Mahler, the Secession sought to bring together fine art and music with applied art such as architecture and design.

1:52The Secession's Art Nouveau Exhibition Hall became a showcase for the international avant-garde and a place to exhibit new ideas about freedom in both art and life. With me to discuss the Vienna Secession are Mark Berry, Professor of Music and Intellectual History at Royal Holloway, University of London, Leslie Topp, Professor Emerita in History of Architecture at Birkbeck, University of London, and the art historian Diane Silverthorne. Diane, how and when did the Vienna secession emerge as a movement? Just to go back to your introduction, the critical year was 1897-1898. That was a year when Gustav Klimt, who had already created quite a reputation for himself as an artist approved of, if you like, by the government of Vienna, and he'd already been decorating panels in some of the new buildings created as part of a big development mandated by the ruling Habsburg emperor.

2:49And he was a member, he had to be a member in order to exhibit, of the only exhibiting body in Vienna, simply called the Kunstlerhaus or exhibition body, which in fact was a privately owned exhibition gallery, a new building which had also been built on what was called the Ringstrasse, Ring Street Development. And that was in cahoots, if you like, with the Academy of Fine Arts. and both the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and the Kunstlerhaus were extraordinarily conservative about the kind of art that they promoted and that they exhibited. And this led through the years, in fact, leading up to 1987, from the early 1900s to 1890, to a great deal of frustration among some of the younger artists who also wanted careers just like Gustav Klimt.

3:37So Klimt firstly tried to create a kind of breakaway group within the Kunstlerhaus to gain more freedoms to exhibit the kind of art they wanted. And when that was unsuccessful, he resigned from the Kunstlerhaus after he'd already sort of gleaned support from a number of notable young architects, designers and other fine artists. And within two years had established the secession as the leading avant-garde art group of Vienna. He had these wonderful portraits, society portraits, which were also rather mysterious and puzzling. Why were they mysterious? They were mysterious because they were not like portraits that were painted in order to illustrate the sort of personality of the sitter.

4:23They were much more about a telling story about what was happening underneath the surface of Vienna through the decorative elements of the portraits. The faces and hands of the women, for example, were the only bits, if you like, of the portrait that looked real and often the hands looked terribly tense, which again was a feature of Gustave Klimt's art. Mark Berry, can I turn to you? First of all, what do we mean in this context by the word secession? I suppose we mean really seceding from official bodies in some sense and actually creating your own. And as Diane said, the Parisian love of controversy back to the Ancien Régime, this had been something very much from the creation of what we used to call at least a bourgeois public sphere in the 18th century.

5:09but perhaps still do. But in terms of Viennese institutions, this is probably rather less so, but had been preempted in a way by a similar secession in Munich before a Munich secession. The Berlin secession would happen shortly afterwards. So this was... Secession basically means breaking away from the status quo. Yes, exactly. And from those organisational structures in terms of visual art. Was there a guiding vision? We talk about coffee houses meeting together and so on. But was there a guiding vision about this? I mean, it seems more than when two or three were gathered together, doesn't it?

5:45Yes, I think so. And as Diane said, in these coffee houses, there's a wonderful book by Edward Timms on Vienna at this time which has a diagram, actually, of circles and people who are members of those circles and how they interact, almost mirroring the tables of the coffee houses in a way. And one of the great things about coffee houses at the time was they were clubs to which anyone could enter and read the newspaper, take the coffee, discuss at a much lesser price than gentlemen's clubs, which would have been the way one might do it in Parmal or something like that. And that tension, I think, between the individual and not so much the collective, because that's a perennial tension.

6:31You can hardly have society without that. But between those and those organisational structures, musicians were doing very much the same. At the time, Arnold Schoenberg's early music rejected by the Viennese musical institutions. and he and his colleagues going on to found new musical institutions of themselves. They didn't actually call it a secession, but I think it's part very much of this secession movement. How did they all come together as effective groups to overthrow an established gallery, an established way of making your way as an artist in those times? Quite a big thing to do. It wasn't just two or three people, but the strategies, what was happening?

7:13Yes, and in many ways quite a modern publicity movement. They have a journal, Ver Sacrum, who's Holy Spring. Holy Spring, yes. And it's designed by one of their members, Josef Hoffmann, and the celebrated slogan that meets you when you enter the secession house, Deidseid ihrer Kunst, Deidkunst ihrer Freiheit. To this time, it's art. To art, it's freedom. And I think that issue of timeliness is very important there and is something of a modernistic emblem in that sense. The idea that art is appropriate to a time rather than necessarily observing classical verities that continue from time to time, I think, is part of what is going on here.

8:02It's still quite amazing watching it happen, these different architects, artists, all coming together with one idea and forcing it through. How do they do that? I'm not so sure. It is simply one idea. I mean, there's the idea of seceding, I suppose, if that's what we're talking about. That's the one idea I'm talking about. Yes, but there are many artistic ideas that are part of that, and it's more, as it were, an opposition, well, almost having been forced out because they need to be able to show their art. One of their great motives was to create an art which was specifically for Austria. And some of the commentators at the time, Hermann Barr, who was a great supporter of the secession, theatrical director and impresario, was writing great tracts and criticisms of the cultural environment of Vienna at the time in terms of the visual arts, that Austria didn't have its own art.

8:55And the other guiding principle, essentially, was to create new art which would rejuvenate life. So the importance really coming out of that whole Jürgenstil, Art Nouveau period, was to bring together the fine arts, the applied arts and architecture, to create some greater art form which would not only be beautiful but would beautify life. And those were two of the driving missions, if you like, of the Vienna Secession. Leslie, can you tell us more about what they were breaking away from? Yes. So the group that they were all members of initially was called the Society of Visual Artists of Vienna.

9:32And as Diane mentioned, it went by a kind of nickname, as it were, the Kunstlerhaus, which is the name of the building where they exhibited. The artist's house, that translates as. It ran all the juries that would select artists for international exhibitions, and it put on its own exhibitions in its premises. So what started happening, especially in the 1890s, is that there were a series of scandals where young artists submitted works to be exhibited as part of the Kunstlerhaus exhibitions, and these were rejected by the jury. There's one instance of a young artist called Joseph Engelhardt, who'd been in Paris for a couple of years.

10:14He came back, he had a watercolor of a young female nude figure done in a naturalistic mode, so it looked like it could be a real woman rather than some kind of allegory. And she's picking cherries in an orchard. This was, as I say, rejected by the jury on both aesthetic grounds and moral grounds. It was seen as not suitable viewing material for the respectable audiences, especially female audiences of Vienna. And so people rallied around Engelhardt and protested and camps developed within the institution. The young ones and the old ones, the Jungen, came to be this camp around which people rallied looking for change within that institution initially.

10:58And then eventually they turned their backs on it. Was Vienna singular in having this secession going on? Or was it happening in other cities and other places in a not dissimilar way? It was happening in other places. So the Munich secession was a couple of years before, as Mark mentioned. The Viennese secession, in their journal, they published a short blurb about why they had called it the secession. And they referred to the Roman Republican phenomenon of secessio plebis, when the plebeian population withdrew from the city in about 495 BC onto the sacred mountain and left all the patricians to try to get by without them as a kind of ethical protest against the conditions in which they were being made to live.

11:46And so the Munich secession initially and then the Vienna secession pick up on this idea of a group that is named after the split and named after this kind of ethical stance that they're taking against the elites that they were subject to. Thank you very much. Can we go back to you for a moment, Mark? What was it about Vienna that made this such a potent movement? I think part of it is that there is a very engaged public there as well, that artists are really doing battle not only with institutions, but also with sections of a hostile public. And that publicity makes good stories. Vienna at the time was a very febrile place politically, socially.

12:35I mean, it was an extremely multicultural city, for one thing. Why was that, do you think? It's the seat of a multicultural empire, Austria-Hungary, which has a huge influx of migration. For example, you know, Jewish people coming from Eastern Europe, but also from all parts of the empire, from Bohemia, from Hungary, from other parts of Europe as well. And they are partly coming because it is a city of art, of the arts in general. I mean, it has a very lengthy musical history in that sense. And there's this intermingling, and that's attractive to young people, to young artists. But there are also very conservative institutions, as both Leslie and Diane were telling us.

13:22And they are sort of upholding those sort of classical verities. We talked about, you know, for example, there's the Vienna School of Art History, very influential at the time, debating ideas of what is beautiful. what is ugly, whether these are actually terms that in contemporary Vienna, that is the Vienna around about 1900, even have any meaning anymore. This blurring of the ethical and the aesthetic is called into question, particularly as newer drives are being taken more into account, whether it be by writers, painters, musicians, particularly ideas of the unconscious, the truths that lie beneath the surface of the city and of the person.

14:06So you think that psychology is an important part to play in all this? Very much so. I mean, there's the preoccupation with dreams, for example. I mean, everybody, in a sense, has been preoccupied with dreams at some time or another, but it's very important. And the idea that they are getting to a truth that is being concealed by reality, I think is an extremely potent one at this time. And of course, it's the Vienna out of which Freud emerges as well. One of the really practical reasons why that was such a draw, Vienna, for people in all these areas in the visual arts and beyond was the education that was offered there.

14:43So the Academy of Fine Arts was the Imperial and Royal Academy of Fine Arts. And that was where if you wanted to make it as an artist at the highest level, you sought to come and study whether that was as a painter, sculptor or architect. So, for instance, there was an architecture kind of masterclass being run there by Otto Wagner, who's seen as the real progenitor of modern architecture in this period. And he has students from all over the empire, the Czech lands, Poland, etc., studying with him, Italy as well. And there's also another art school, equally important, the School of Applied Arts and Industry, which was a great crucible for design innovation and had two of the key secession members, Josef Hoffman and Koloman Moser, were very important professors there.

15:31Diane, can I come to you? And then I'll come back to you, Leslie. Let's talk about the secession building, what it was and why it was so important and why it worked. Yes, so if we can imagine the secessionists gathering around, as Marcus said, not just mythical coffee tables and planning to create this exhibition building which was going to be radical in the way it was designed and the place where they could not only exhibit Austrian art, their own new art, but also bring artists from across Europe to exhibit and there hadn't been much interest previously in bringing artists together. So amongst their membership they kind of recruited two architects, one in particular, Joseph Maria Ulbrecht, who was a Prix de Rome awarded architect and had also come up through Otto Wagner's school.

16:20And this incredibly talented architect started to create a one-storey white and gold pavilion, which the front of the building was strikingly different in its simplicity and whiteness, if you like, looked rather like and was often compared to a Greek temple. And the top of the back end, if you like, where the exhibition hall was created, essentially used new materials like glass and steel to create this extraordinary greenhouse effect on the back of the building so that the main hall, the main exhibition hall, was flooded with light. Not only that, it was also, as I say, utterly simplified. There were large areas of just empty white wall at the front of the building inlaid with golden flattened decoration.

17:08It had a golden dome of laurel leaves, which again had symbolic and allegorical meaning. Inside the hall, although it was a very specific format, the shape of the building was in a Greek cross design, there were no barriers apart from very slim pillars around which to create exhibition design. So one of the great talents, if you like, that several of the leading secessionists brought to bear on this amazingly versatile space was the development of exhibition design, which essentially meant that they could create a new way of looking at exhibitions that have really never been seen in that way before in Europe.

17:47Can I come back to you for a moment, Les? Did it have a distinctive drive, this place that they'd built, this white palace? It was highly distinctive and highly controversial at the time. It might be worth saying that there was an initial site for the building right on the Ringstrasse. Diane mentioned this Ringstrasse Boulevard built on the old city walls, which was the big project of monumental historicist revivalist architecture from the 1860s onwards. They initially wanted to build their building right there, which is interesting, and that would have really made quite a splash. But the land that they were hoping to be granted was controlled by the defence ministry, which complained that it would bring the land values down in the surrounding area.

18:30And as a result, they had to find another spot. So they end up in a kind of outer zone of the Ringstrasse, a really interesting site facing the St. Charles Church, which is a very important Baroque church, also very white with a very prominent dome. And some of the visual language of the building is a much modernized kind of nod to the St. Charles Church. It also has all around it the big vegetable market of Vienna, which is still a very famous place. Can we get to people now? Which artists were prominent and why were they prominent there? So I think the first one really to start with is Klimt.

19:08And he, of course, is the leader of the group, but he's also extremely important as an artist, not just as someone that people rally around. One way into this is to think about two particular works that he creates right in this first couple of years of the secession. One of them was called Nuda Veritas, The Naked Truth. And like a lot of his works, it experimented with format. So it was two meters high, this work, and only 50 centimeters wide. So a very tall, narrow format, very unconventional. It depicted a naked woman who was supposed to be a kind of allegory of truth. But what was so unusual and really very jarring to people about this painting is that she seemed to be a real woman.

19:55She was depicted in this naturalistic mode. Even her pubic hair was shown, which would have been completely unheard of in allegorical female nudes, which were, of course, very common before that. And she had coal-rimmed eyes, a red mouth, luxuriant red hair in a kind of pre-Raphaelite mode. And she's depicted right up against the picture plane with an abstracted background, zones of abstract colour with some quite abstracted ornamentation, not any kind of recognisable space she's in. It's almost like a kind of graphic art rendition, the background. And she's holding up a mirror to the viewer, not for herself to look in, but for the viewer to look in.

20:39And Mark mentioned this search for the truth in Vienna, this idea that you're constantly trying to get away from surfaces and into something behind. And this was the challenge of this painting, the naked truth, to try to get to what's behind surfaces. Why does the world want American surrogates? I'm Asma Khalid, and I host the Global Story podcast from the BBC. Paying someone to carry a pregnancy is banned in most of Europe, and large parts of Asia as well. But here in the US, business is booming, though as the popularity has grown, so too has the public debate around the ethics of it all. For more, listen to The Global Story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

21:27Mark, let's turn to music now. There were a great number of important composers associated with the movement. What were their most influential works? Maybe you just want to concentrate on one or two of them. Well, I think I would start with Schoenberg, whom I mentioned before, who, unlike many so-called Viennese composers, was actually Viennese, was born in Vienna. Vienna has a great history of importing composers, whom it reveres and actually ignoring those who come from Vienna itself, Schubert being another example. But Schoenberg was also unusual in that, not that he was a Jewish composer, but that his background was not a wealthy Jewish background at all.

22:10He was from rather, as it were, lower middle class stock and didn't have the education that many of his Jewish and other peers was. I mean, he essentially taught himself. but a work more or less consistent with the secession in many ways would be his string sextet Transfigured Night or Fickler den Nacht in the German and it's very interesting in many ways partly because it is more or less I think the first and may even be the first piece of chamber music that uses what we call a programme that is a text from outside music a poem which it sets more or less verse-to-verse, but only in music. And the text is not unklimp-like in that sense.

22:57It's a text by the poet Richard Daimel and is the story of a woman going into a forest. She's married someone she was not in love with. She meets a man and bears his child. And this isn't a tragedy. This isn't some horrible situation where everything is screwed up. It's presented as natural, as a transfiguring moment. You mentioned the word Jewish there. A lot of this was subsidized by Jewish patrons. Am I right? Yes. I mean, by patrons of all sorts. But certainly there were a lot of wealthy patrons who were Jewish and in many ways tended actually to be rather more artistically adventurous than the sort of institutions the secession was rebelling against.

23:46Yes, just to go back to that earlier question about the secession building and how it was established. Leslie very well described that it had this extraordinary position on land, which was given to them by the state in the end, by the government. But it wouldn't have come into being unless the Wittgenstein family hadn't funded it almost entirely. so Karl Wittgenstein did fund the secession building again rather like one of these very wealthy industrialists assimilated Jewish families, second generation who were passionately interested in driving forward and supporting art and architecture into the modern period Was there any sense that there was friction between that and an anti-Semitic feeling in the city?

24:33Anti-Semitism in Vienna was a way of life by 18... What does that mean? Well, I will explain what I mean. If we just go back to 1897, 1898, a number of things happened that year, which is a way of getting into this whole subject of the sort of swirling institutionalized, one might say, anti-Semitism. Gustav Mahler was appointed as director of the Vienna Court Opera, but before he was allowed to take his position up, he had to convert from his Jewish-born origins to Catholicism. Nevertheless, he was still, as he went through the years, he was both applauded but also criticised and vilified by the institutionalised anti-Semitic press.

25:15In the same year, the mayor of Vienna, a figure called Karl Lueger, who was the Christian Socialist Party, was elected as mayor of Vienna on what might describe as an anti-Semitic ticket, borrowing from German nationalism, which was also a prevailing politics, if you like, of the time, led by a politician called George Schoenerer. So we have this very strange mix around the time that the secession was established of this sense of liberal enlightenment, which was portrayed by the emperor and the way that he created these amazing buildings of the Ringstrasse to represent the arts, culture and universities in all sorts of different historical styles.

25:59and we have this sort of driving anti-Semitism also partly caused by what Mark referred to earlier which was the hundreds and hundreds of people who were bound, if you like, for Vienna which became very, very crowded in fact and very polyglot by the end of the century from across the whole of the empire. And going back to Leslie's example of Gustav Klimt being our sort of leading exemplar of what was going on in the art world The secessionists themselves, the artists of the secession, unlike most of the musicians who were successful at the time, were themselves not Jewish. So there wasn't a sense that the secession was established and also joined in, if you like, the sort of anti-Semitic movements and tendencies.

26:47but of course as with the secession house we also have Klimt's art and also the art of other protagonists of the secession the applied arts as the most important patrons who helped to create an environment in which modern art, Klimt's very important portraits of the wealthy wives of some of the industrialists were created essentially using and being supported by Jewish circles if you like, middle class circles Thank you very much. Can I switch to music now with Beethoven and the influence he had? He was massively important in the city. Why? What was the consequence of that? Beethoven, I mean, it's impossible to imagine the history we have of 19th century music without him.

27:32I mean, he stands in music almost like Shakespeare does for English literature in that sort of sense. And certainly Richard Wagner saw them as similar progenitors of his art, his music drama, which sought to combine the two. But Beethoven's art was mostly not musicodramatic. It was instrumental. It was orchestral. So it had something, in a sense, for everyone. Wagner and his Viennese disciples claimed the Beethoven of the Ninth Symphony, who was on at the secession. Mahler arranged music from the Ninth Symphony. when the word enters the symphonic realm. And that was part of it. But also most of Beethoven's music fit in very well at the official institutions.

28:17The Musiqueverein fit very well with the Brahms strand of 19th century music. And Viennese musical culture at the time had these two factions. Broadly, one might say, progressive Wagnerian, at least in aesthetic terms, often highly questionable in political terms, and more conservative Brahmsian in the sense. And Brahms was another of those adopted sons of Vienna. So everyone could claim something from Beethoven, and Schoenberg was one of those composers who were really the first composer to try to reconcile those two Beethovenian strands, those of Wagner and of Brahms. and that was in a sense what his early music was all about.