The Vienna Secession

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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 arts such as architecture and design.

The 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 BNS 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 BNS 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.

And he was a member, he had to be a member in order to exhibit of the only exhibiting body in Vienna, simply called the Kunstla Haus 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 Kunstler Haus 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 amongst some of the younger artists who also wanted careers just like Gustav Klimt.

So Klimt firstly tried to create a kind of breakaway group within the Kunstler House to gain more freedoms to exhibit the kind of art they wanted.

And when that was unsuccessful, he resigned from the Kunstler House 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 succession as the leading avant-garde art group of Vienna.

He had these wonderful portrait society portraits which were also rather mysterious and puzzling.

They were mysterious because they were not like portraits that were painted in order to illustrate the sort of personality of the sitter.

They 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 Klimp's art.

Mark Berry, can I judge 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 regime, this had been something very much from the sort of creation of what we used to call at least a bourgeois public sphere in the 18th century, and 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...

The secession basically means breaking away from the status quo.

Yes, exactly, and from those organizational 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?

Yes, I think so.

And as Diane said in these coffee houses, there's a wonderful book by Edward Times on Vienna at this time, which has a diagram actually of circles and people who are a member 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 Palmall or something like that.

And that tension, I think, between

the individual and not so much the collective, because that's a perennial tension, you can hardly have society without that, but between those and those organizational 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?

Yes, and in many ways, quite a modern publicity movement.

You know, they have a journal, Ver Sacrum,

whose 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, Dead seit irre kunst, der kunst ire Freiheit.

To this time, it's art, to art it's freedom.

So, and I think that issue of timeliness is very important there and, you know, 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.

It's still quite amazing watching it happen.

These different architects, artists, all coming together with one idea and forcing it through.

How did 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.

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 Bauer, 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.

And the other guiding principle essentially was to create new art which would rejuvenate life so the importance really coming out of that whole Jugendstil, Arnouveaux 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.

And as Diane mentioned, it went by a kind of nickname, as it were, the Kunstler Haus, which is the name of the building where they exhibited, the artists' 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 there were a series of scandals where young artists submitted works to be exhibited as part of the Kunstler Haus exhibitions, and these were rejected by the jury.

There's one instance of a young artist called Josef Engelhardt, who'd been in Paris for a couple of years.

He 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, and 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.

And 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, you know, artists are really doing battle not only with institutions, but also with sections of a hostile public.

And that, you know, that publicity makes good stories.

I mean, Vienna, at the time, was a very febrile place politically, socially.

I mean, it was an extremely multicultural city, for one thing.

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, you know, 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, and 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.

So, you think that psychology has 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 there was such a draw in Vienna for people in all these areas in the visual arts and beyond was the education that was offered there.

So 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, Joseph Hoffmann and Coleman Moser, who were very important professors there.

Diane, 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 round, 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 they, amongst their membership, they kind of recruited two architects, one in particular, Joseph Maria Ulbrich, who was a Pri-Deróm awarded architect and had also come up through Otto Wagner's School.

And 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 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.

It 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 designs.

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.

Can I come back to you for a moment?

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.

And 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 I get your people now?

Which artists were prominent and why were they prominent there?

So I think the first one really to start with is Klimpt.

And 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 round.

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 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.

She 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 color with some quite abstracted ornamentation, not any kind of recognizable space she's in.

It's almost like a kind of graphic art rendition in 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.

And 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.

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Mark, 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.

He was from rather as it were, lower-middle-class stock and didn't have the education that many of his Jewish and other peers wanted.

I mean, he essentially taught himself.

But a work more or less constant with the secession in many ways would be his string sextet,

Transfigured Knight or Ficletenacht 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 program, 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 unklimpt-like in that sense.

It'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.

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.

Yes, just to go back to that earlier question about the secession building and how it was established, Leslie very well described that it it had this extraordinary position on land which was given to them by the state in the end by the the government but it wouldn't have come into being unless the Wittgenstein family hadn't funded it almost entirely.

So Carl Wittgenstein did fund the secession building.

Again, rather like one of these very wealthy industrialist, 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?

Anti-Semitism in Vienna was a way of life by 18, in a sense, 18, 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, institutionalised, 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.

In the same year, the mayor of Vienna, a figure called Carl Weger, 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'd created these amazing buildings of the Ringstrasse to represent the arts, culture and universities in all sorts of different historical styles.

And 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 Klimp being our sort of leading exemplar of what was going on in the art world, the secessionists themselves, the art, 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.

But of course, as with the Secession House, we also have Klimp'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 climps 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.

I 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, which 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 honored at the secession.

Mahler arranged music from the Ninth Symphony when the word enters the symphonic realm.

And that was part that was part of it.

But also most of Beethoven's music fit in very well at the official institutions, the Musik Verein, fit very well with the Brahms strand of nineteenth century music.

And Viennese musical culture at the time had these two factions, broadly one might say, progressive Wagnerian, at least in aesthetic terms, not necessarily, I mean often highly questionable in political terms, and more conservative Brahmian in the sense.

And Brahms was another of those adopted sons of Vienna.

So everyone could claim something from Beethoven.

And Schanberg 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.

As Mark has said, and as you've spotted, Beethoven cast a hugely long shadow across the whole of the century in Vienna in various ways.

The myth of Beethoven wandering the streets of Vienna in the early part of the 19th century.

Very ragged.

Looking deep in thought, he was by then, you know, he's often pictured actually in graphic designs, in graphic illustrations, as the man with the hands behind his back looking very stern, walking through the streets of Vienna.

And people felt that in this sort of magical moment, he was listening, because of his deafness, he was able to hear the sort of spheres of music coming from space almost.

And he was also quite a champion, ultimately, of Napoleon, until Napoleon turned rotten.

And even after he died, and his funeral was attended by thousands and thousands of people, his music was still being puzzled by, even though people knew, it was extraordinarily innovative, and particularly the Ninth Symphony, when the voice and the poetry of Schiller was used for this great chorus.

And if I just might add, in 1902,

thanks to a promise by a then a very well-known Leipzig artist called Max Klinger, who is not very well known now, but was an extremely important artist at the time, who also adored and loved music and was very knowledgeable, the secessionists were promised his monument to Beethoven, which he sculpted out of marbles, this figure of Beethoven sitting on an articulated bronze throne.

And he had promised the secession that when this extraordinary monument was completed, they would have first dibs, if you like, at exhibiting it.

So bringing together the kind of mythological status of Beethoven and the extraordinary flexibility of the secession house, they created one of their most, if not their most famous exhibitions, the 1902 Beethoven Exhibition, which was entirely devoted to the spirit and ideas of Beethoven.

Georgia Gominier.

And I think something that was attractive about Beethoven, as well as the glowering images of the romantic artist we see in the paintings and so on.

I mean, he looks just like he ought to, was the idea that he had composed for posterity, which is a semi-fiction in some ways.

But his late music and late Beethoven, I think, became an idea in itself, particularly the Beethoven of the late string quartets, which was seen as not understood by the publics of their time, perhaps not even understood by the public seventy, eighty years later.

But the Beet they were considered to be very difficult, introverted music written by a deaf person, and that trope in Beethoven discussion keeps coming up again.

I mean it's it's a very questionable one in many ways, but he certainly wasn't writing for the instruments of the time in the sense that he could hear them.

He was having to resort to his imagination, to what he thought things sounded like.

And when you have his late piano sonata, the so-called Hammer Clavier sonata, it's more or less unplayable on any piano, but it's pretty much impossible to play on a piano at the time.

Some of the tempo markings are simply impossible really to observe in performance, or it becomes a mess when they did.

So there's something cultish about this, the idea of someone who was hurling his lance into the future, as another of his disciples with a very strong Vienna aspect to his history.

Frantz Liszt described his music.

So that avant-gardeism, I think, is very important in the idea of Beethoven.

Which is why he was such an attractive figure, in a sense, for the secession, because they were aligning themselves with this extraordinary avant-garde characteristic of Beethoven.

An important manifestation of that in the Beethoven exhibition is this very famous frieze by Gustav Klimpt that he paints around four walls of the main exhibition room that tells a story of this piece of music and combines figures of great kind of idealism and beauty with very grotesque and quite irrational figures in this medley that was really fascinating to people at the time and is still really fascinating.

People can still see this frieze in the Secession House where it's been moved down into a basement room and it's an amazing work of art that, as I say, is unique in Klimp's work in being a story told over space.

While we're with you, could you talk about architecture at the time?

Yes, so architecture was really central to what the Secession was doing, which is important because that's unusual.

You don't get that, for instance, in French avant-garde movements where you have painters joining together with architects and designers.

It was something that was characteristic of this Central European milieu, where there was seen to be a lot of shared ideals among...

Why do you think it took place so strongly in that area?

I think this has a lot to do with the legacy of the Ringstrasse we've talked about a few times.

Suddenly, over a couple of decades, they needed to build these monumental buildings for the opera, the Art History Museum, the Parliament, the City Hall, the University, the Imperial Theatre.

And all of those were total works of art.

They were combinations of architecture, sculpture, and they were heavily decorated inside with painting as well.

And so that idea that the three arts work very much together at an older legacy in Vienna is really baked into institutions like the Kunster House.

And so it's not surprising that it is then these three aspects plus the very, very important role of modern design coming into it as well.

Marcus mentioned to every age its art, to art its freedom, which was written in relief in gold lettering, very modernistic gold lettering, something else that the secession were very able to do, drive lettering as a decorative art form into the future.

But underneath that sort of motif, which is as close as we can get to some kind of manifesto, also there are the three gold heads in relief of three gorgons, and their snake-like hair is essentially guarding three words: architecture, painting, and the plastic arts.

So, it was always the intention of the secession to bring together the three arts into this new age.

Did women have any place in this movement?

The secession was a sort of club.

There were secession members who were Austrian, and there were also what were called foreign members who were artists from around Europe, prominent artists who also supported the secession movement, as they had done when the Munich Secession got going in 1892.

And when the secession was formed, there were no female artists' members.

So what's come down through the last hundred years really is not a story of women artists who participated in the secession exhibitions or who gained a reputation anything like even some of the applied artists in the secession.

On the other hand, there were female artists who did exhibit not only within the secession building, but also in two major exhibitions that were called the Kuntschau exhibitions, which simply again means just art show, which were created in 1908 and 1909 when Klimt and what were pejoratively called the decorator artists, the painters and decorators, actually left the secession house and created two magnificent self-standing pavilion-like art exhibitions in the centre of Vienna, where the same figures who were dominating the secession were also leading a whole new way of teaching at the applied art school, the Kunskerbeschule, where they were appointed to to rejuvenate teaching.

And a lot more women were then being trained at the applied arts school and exhibited in these two great exhibitions in 1908 and 1909.

Mark, can we now turn to yet something else that was going on there, which is psychoanalysis?

What part did that play in the general melee or organized, well organized, wasn't chaos?

Organisation of artists pushing forward on apparently a united front in some ways.

Yes, I mean I think it's certainly part of what is going on here, although I think in some senses we perhaps exaggerate the importance because Freud has been so foundational to 20th century thought and culture thereafter that we see him perhaps as more central to the life of Vienna at the time than perhaps he was.

But nonetheless, the great interest in the unconscious, and perhaps in the idea also that even if one buries down to what is at the bedrock of human existence, one might still find a lie, one might never actually get to truth at all, and that that might be the sort of riddle we have to deal with is, of course, a very rich idea and one I think that is perhaps particularly amenable to artistic expression in all sorts of spheres.

I agree with Mark that it's hard to draw a direct line between what's happening in the secession and psychoanalysis, particularly.

But there was a lot of interest in other approaches to what were called nervous ailments at the time.

there was a huge amount of writing and indeed of lived experience of what we would now refer to as depression, anxiety, disorders of the nerves of various kinds.

And we can see a direct connection when we look at a building that Josef Hoffmann, one of the key architect members of the secession, built in 1904, which is called the Perkersdorf Sanatorium.

It was built in a very beautiful area in the Vienna Woods on the outskirts of Vienna.

It's a white cubic, highly advanced, innovative building in which one was supposed to live a very regimented, simple life surrounded by beautiful objects of, again, highly simplified, technologically advanced design.

And there you would experience a cure for the nervous ailment that was bothering you.

Of course, this was a bit like Freud's psychoanalysis.

This was really only for people that could afford that kind of treatment.

There was also a large state psychiatric hospital designed by Otto Wagner.

If we go back a few years again to the early 1890s, Arthur Schnitzler, one of the most important members of what were called Jung Vehen, which were the literary figures who, in a sense, predate the beginning of the secession, had already started writing the most extraordinary stream of consciousness novellas, if you like, one called Lieutenant Gustel, which is about a sort of senior soldier who spends the whole of the night wandering around the Ringstrasse, trying to argue in his own mind about whether or not he's been insulted and whether or not he should commit suicide.

And Arthur Schnitzler was latterly seen.

Again, we look at the forthcoming sort of shadow of Freud as a kind of precursor.

Freud recognised him in fact in his writings as a precursor of having an understanding and exposing sexual and other social tensions through his stories, very much as Freud would later do through the talking cure.

So in a sense there was already this fascination.

There was also a hugely sort of repressed idea about sexuality, particularly amongst the younger generation.

And that was also part of the context in which the secession came into being, if you like.

Can you talk a bit about the legacy of the secession, starting with you, Dan?

One of the important legacies of the secession goes back to this whole idea of the applied arts coming together to create some greater whole.

And I suppose you can also trace that into the 20th century by looking at the Bauhaus, for example, which was not directly inspired by the secession but some of those principles of the applied arts were certainly brought forward into modernity and I think the second thing is also the way they designed their exhibitions to in a sense take ideas strangely enough which in fact were written about by Max Klinger the artist of the

the central feature of the Beethoven exhibition this idea of a unified design inside the secession house to create an atmosphere a themed themed exhibition, was completely new and completely different.

And we might look at that, they actually called it a particular name, Raumkunst, or spatial art, which then became known as the new art of exhibition design.

And we might look back to some of those succession exhibitions, particularly the 1902 Klinger Beethoven exhibition, where a prevailing environment was created.

And the audience, in a sense, were manipulated through a series of passages and spaces in order to be immersed in the art itself.

And one could say that's a precursor of immersive art, which is one of the buzzwords of the 21st century.

The notion of the white cube, which you hear about as the kind of dominant form of art viewing, especially of modern art in museums today, where you have completely white walls, white ceiling, white floor, and artworks isolated in a large white plane, and so that you're supposed to be able to commune with those artworks and really get absorbed in them.

That has its roots in the Vienna secession, especially in some of the slightly later exhibitions, 1904-1905.

Coleman Moser designed the exhibition of Klimt's work that they showed around that time.

Amazingly forward-looking, if you see the images of it.

One thing that interests me about the secession now, as it were, I mean, quite apart from the fact that it still exists, there are still secession exhibitions and so on now.

We shouldn't think it's entirely historical.

But leaving that slightly aside, the idea of the Vienna secession as a moment and as a visual moment seems now to be almost the primary visual idea of what Vienna as a city is.

This idea of Vienna, city of dreams, you think immediately of a climped picture.

And this art that in many ways was trying to dig beneath the surface has almost paradoxically or dialectically, I suppose one might say, has become the surface of it has actually become the most alluring thing that has endured as an idea of what Vienna is.

Well, thank you all very much.

Thanks to Mark Berry, Leslie Topp, and Diane Silverthorne.

Next week, the evolution of lungs.

Thank you for listening.

And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

Leslie, did you not get time to say something you'd like to say?

I think it's important to think about what comes directly after this kind of heroic moment of the secession, because that's part of its legacy as well.

There was a really interesting backlash, really, against the secession that pointed to the way that the secession was quite implicated in

elite power structures at the time, in kind of providing

decorative objects for the interiors of wealthy people and so on.

And so you get artists like Oskar Kokoshka and Aegon Schiller,

also two very well-known Viennese artists of this very slightly later period,

who can be seen as developing an artistic language that's much harsher,

that's expressionist

in a much more rough-edged way, both aesthetically and in terms of

the vision that underlies it.

And the same thing happens in architecture, in fact.

So Adolf Loes is a great friend of those two artists.

He's an architect who

from the very beginning is highly critical of the secession as kind of

spending too much time on surface.

And his friend Karl Krauss, the cultural critic, has the fantastic saying,

the more exquisite the packaging, the more dubious the content.

And so that kind of gets across that

razor-sharp critical idea that comes to the fore in Vienna that Ludwig Wittgenstein, the philosopher, is also associated with.

And that that can be seen as a legacy of the secession in that they were kind of bracing themselves against the secession and developing the modern in a different direction.

Can I come back to you, Ma?

Yes, and I was going to say the names Leslie mentions there, for example, Kokoshka, Sheila, and Karl Krauss, these were all people Schoenberg knew very well as well.

And Schoenberg's very interesting in that he was a painter as well.

He was an exhibited painter.

And Kandinsky thought very highly of him, asked him to contribute to the Blauer Reiter, the Blue Rider almanac, and so on.

And the idea of the arts coming together, which many of these people talk about, they speak about music as if it were visual art and the other way around.

Schoenberg, in his opera of this time, Dieglücklicher Ham, The Hand of Fate, actually devised something that he called a colour crescendo, which was to be part of the staging.

I mean, so it's very much a multimedia idea in which the orchestra and the staging work together visually and musically, and you really can't dissolve them.

And one certainly sees that sort of influence in Kandinsky's art as well.

To pick up on that very important point of Schoenberg's circle, which was very much the Kraus circle, Adolf Loes,

Schoenberg's Dieglüttricke Hand was in part inspired also by a legacy, a little written about, little known legacy of the secession.

One of their rather behind-the-scenes figures, a designer called Alfred Roller, was essentially airlifted in a way out of the secession in 1902-1903 after the Beethoven exhibition, where Mahler had actually played a small part and was appointed as Mahler's stage design director for a very

groundbreaking production of Tristan and Isolde, which took place in Vienna in 1903.

And that was the first time when

it's very well well

accounted for that Wagner's ideas about light and lighting effects that were part of the atmosphere of this perhaps one of his greatest works, Tristan and Isolde, were actually put into action by Roller and the music also had a sort of transformative element to it in the hands of Mahler, which was then

in a sense

certainly influenced Schoenberg, who saw that production of Tristan and Isolde.

And Alfred Roller, unlike a lot of other of the figures we've been talking about, didn't die in 1918 and went on, in fact, to become part of a Sieta Reform movement which completely transformed the way drama and opera were presented, also on behalf of other figures like Richard Strauss.

Was there a sense in which other cities, artists in other cities, were saying, we've got to get to Vienna to join in this great thing, we're being left behind?

I think I'd like to think there were, and certainly the secessionists were seen by British artists in the arts and crafts movement and by critics across Europe as being at last having kind of

woken up from a deep slumber as taking part in modern art.

And what fascinated some of the critics and writers of their work and also who actually were invited to the exhibitions to write about them, the reviewers,

was the strange term, a German term, Stimmung, which in fact Wagner uses a lot in his written works, Artwork of the Future and Music and Drama, to convey the

affect of not only the

music drama, but the affect of what he wanted to create on the stage, which he did eventually in Bayreuth.

This idea that the artwork and that Klimp's portraits and these exhibitions created something called Stimmung, a highly prized aesthetic element of effect, was the prize that they'd been reaching for across all of these arts in music, drama, and the theater.

There's an interesting legacy of the secession, which is a kind of worry about commercializing art.

And that goes right back to the time of the secession itself, where there were phenomena that people referred to as the false secession.

The leaking of secessionist

ornament and style into mass-produced objects of everyday use,

of fabrics and furniture and dishes and things like that, posters, advertising.

That was very, very common right from the very beginning.

And you still see it as a way of kind of undermining what the secession was doing or seeing it as somehow superficial, the fact that it had that reach.

I know this is repeating to a certain extent what we did earlier, but I think it deserves maybe a bit more attention, you tell me, the relationship between the secession and anti-Semitism.

Right.

As I said earlier, the secession themselves, unlike the musicians that Mark has mentioned, Schoenberg

and

Mahler and Zemlinsky, of course, who was Schoenberg's brother-in-law and who was partly

helpful in helping Schoenberg come to his kind of musical compositions,

were Jewish-born even if assimilated.

And the main Jung-Ween, who were already sort of pushing the boundaries of what was possible in a highly controlled society where polytests and sexuality and gender were highly topical issues, were also mainly Jewish-born Schnitzler, particularly Hugo von Hoffenstahl, who was a child prodigy poet, who was also Jewish-born, who ended up again

writing, working with Richard Strauss and writing libretti for some of his important operas.

I think one way of looking at all of this, this sort of swirling atmosphere of anti-Semitism and indeed misogyny, is to look at the writings of not perhaps Freud at this time, but of a young man called Otto Weininger,

who in 1902 published a thesis called Geschlecht und Karichter, which is Sex and Character, which was highly controversial but also taken quite seriously and widely circulated in cultural circles in Vienna, which essentially elided the demise of masculinity and the sort of state of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was blamed on the way in which irrational women undermined the rationality of men.

And then he managed to elide the feminization of culture, also blamed it on not only women but the Jewish population, who were also feminizing the culture and society.

And even Freud gave some credence to these ideas.

So around the secession, we have this kind of extraordinary, these contested ideas about both the woman question and the Jewish question.

I could just come in briefly on that.

There's this phrase that circulates too, isn't there?

La gou juife.

It's a French phrase that gets, for some reason, used in the French, Jewish taste

to label what the secession was doing.

So that was a way of, in a way, identifying these non-Jewish artists with their Jewish patrons because they were serving a so-called Jewish taste, which was obviously a kind of anti-Semitic idea.

The other way in which you see anti-Semitic tropes come in

in a rather indirect way is by the the identification of the building as having Eastern roots.

Which building?

The secession building itself.

Yeah.

By Eastern, what do they mean?

Well, it was called things like a Mahdi's tomb or an Assyrian convenience, for instance.

It was the Eastern idea, I think, comes from the way that the building couldn't be pinned down to any particular historical route, and that was very deliberate on Ulbrich's part.

That he did not want the building to look like a copy copy of something from the past, the way that so many other buildings in the city did.

We're coming to the end now.

Would you like to go for the final word, Mark?

I was just going to say, paradoxically, of course, I mean, you could hardly have a more Catholic name than Joseph Maria Ulbric.

But so I think it's actually quite a good indication of how even people who are clearly not Jewish in any sense that can be elided.

I mean, Carl Juge, one of his most celebrated utterances was, I decide who a Jew is.

And that that anti-Semitism that is not even necessarily always focused on Jewish people but some amorphous idea of Jewish culture as a threat I think is perhaps the most insidious thing about Vienna at the time.

Final word.

Yes, I I mean I would agree with that.

That extraordinary mix of paradoxes and opposing views on these issues.

You asked a question why Vienna.

Vienna was unique over a period of that ten to 15 years of having this kind of melting pot, this heated melting pot of ideas underlined by all these other difficult political, anti-Semitic, misogynistic, sexual ideas which caused this extraordinary outflowing of art and culture in so many different ways, music, literature, the arts.

Well, thank you all very much.

Diane, would you like some chill coffee?

Are we still being recorded?

Yes.

Thank you, Eliane.

I would love some coffee.

Leslie, could I have just a cup of hot water?

Hot water?

Yeah.

Tea, please.

Melvin.

Tea, please.

In Our Time with Melvin Bragg was produced by Eliane Glaser, and it is a BBC Studios audio production for Radio 4.

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