Vienna Secession

PurplePrice Mag · October 26, 2026 · 3 min read

The Vienna Secession was born on 3 April 1897, when a group of young artists left the Künstlerhaus, the official association of Viennese artists, in protest against its academic and traditional taste. Its members included the painter Gustav Klimt, who became its first president, the graphic artist and designer Koloman Moser and the architects Josef Hoffmann and Joseph Maria Olbrich; shortly afterwards Otto Wagner joined them.

It is the Austrian version of Art Nouveau, which in Austria is called the "Secession style". But in Vienna the sinuous line soon became more rigorous: squares, rectangles, grids and black-and-white contrasts anticipated the geometry of the twentieth century.

The Secession Building

The group's home is the Secession Building, designed by Olbrich and completed in 1898: a white, cubic volume crowned by a dome of gilded laurel leaves. On the façade, in golden letters, is the movement's motto, attributed to the critic Ludwig Hevesi: "Der Zeit ihre Kunst, der Kunst ihre Freiheit", to every age its art, to art its freedom.

Exhibitions and magazines

The Secession brought modern European art to Vienna, from the French Impressionists to Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow School, and spread its ideas through the magazine Ver Sacrum ("Sacred Spring"), published from 1898 to 1903. Each exhibition was conceived as a total work of art, in which painting, sculpture, architecture and display worked together. The most famous is the 1902 exhibition dedicated to Beethoven, designed by Hoffmann: in the centre Max Klinger's statue of the composer, on the walls Klimt's Beethoven Frieze, which can still be seen in the building today.

The Wiener Werkstätte

In 1903 Hoffmann and Moser founded, with the patron Fritz Waerndorfer, the Wiener Werkstätte, workshops where artists and craftsmen designed and made everyday objects: furniture, silverware, glass, textiles, jewellery, graphics. The style was essential and geometric, with extreme care for materials and workmanship. Their masterpiece is the Stoclet Palace in Brussels, designed by Hoffmann and completed in 1911, with Klimt's mosaics in the dining room: it is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Hit by the economic crisis, the Wiener Werkstätte closed in 1932.

After Klimt

In 1905 Klimt, Hoffmann, Moser and other artists left the Secession over internal disagreements. Yet the group did not disband: the association, run by artists, still organises contemporary art exhibitions in Olbrich's building today. And its lesson, the search for simple, geometric forms and the union of art and everyday objects, reached all the way to the Bauhaus and Art Deco.