CULTURAL CONTEXT
VIENNESE SECESSION The Vienna Secession (German: Wiener Secession) was formed in 1897 by a group of Austrian artists who had resigned from the Association of Austrian Artists, housed in the Vienna Künstlerhaus. This movement included painters, sculptors, and architects. The first president of the Secession was Gustav Klimt, and Rudolf von Alt was made honorary president. Its official magazine was called Ver Sacrum. Referred to as the “Graphic Artists’ Group” they attempted to transform two-dimensional painted cubism of Picasso and Braque into a three-dimensional architectural form. This movement related as much to art as it did to architecture. Some of the prominent architects associated with the Vienna Secession were Josef Hoffmann, Joseph Maria Olbrich (drawing, opposite page), and Otto Wagner. These architects focussed on bringing purer geometric forms into the designs of their buildings, and often decorated the surface of their buildings with linear ornamentation. This was commonly called whiplash or eel style.
in 1900, as part of his published essay ‘Spoken into the Void’. This storey was an imagined story of a wealthy businessman who had commissioned a Sececcionist architect to design a ‘total’ house for him, including not only the furnishing but also the clothes of the occupants. This man’s life was made miserable and his house rendered unlivable by the excess of applied art created for him by his architect.
The term ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ meaning a ‘Total Work of Art’ was coined by the German opera composer Richard Wagner. His 1849 essays ‘Art and Revolution’ and ‘The Artwork of The Future’ talks of unifying all works of art via theatre. In architecture, this signified that the architect is responsible for the design of a buildings totality. This thought identified that there was not a unification of crafts within the building design and construction process, and influenced the culture of architecture and how we teach in a total design manner understanding architecture as a total craft of many influences.
The Secessionists followed the concept of a total work of art and to do so they tried to bring together Symbolists, Naturalists, Modernists, and Stylists. This total art concept is what Loos attacked in his essay ‘The Poor Little Rich Man’
CULTURAL CONTEXT
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