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There are several significant movements which marked the turn of the century, but certainly one of the most prolific ones was the Vienna Secession. It grew out of the revolt of the artists who were eager to question traditional understanding of what art is and what art should be in regards to the society. Unified by a new vision, this group of artists, architects and designers introduced new concepts by embracing different influences and in general opened a path for the upcoming wave of Modernism.

In order to understand Vienna Secession properly, it is important to understand the context of the end of the nineteenth century or Fin de siècle, which was a quite a dazzling period. It was marked by the dominance of empires, the birth of the modern nation-states, outstanding scientific achievements and rapid industrialization. Nevertheless, a certain ambiguity hovered, so the common belief is that the last decades of the 1900s were followed by degeneration and colored with hope of a new beginning. It was also a time of outstanding contributions to philosophy and literature, all of which reflected on visual arts.

Governed by a desire to move things forward, in 1897 a group of Austrian artists such as Gustav Klimt, Koloman Moser, Egon Schiele, Max Kurzweil, Joseph Maria Olbrich and others resigned from the Association of Austrian Artists, housed in the Vienna Künstlerhaus, and established the Union of Austrian Artists, or Vereinigung Bildender Künstler Österreichs. The group is now known as the Vienna Secession, and its production was dense and stimulative practically until the outbreak of the World War I.

Koloman Moser - Donauwellen, 1901

Vienna Secession - The Request For Change

To be more precise, The Vienna Secession was formed as a critical reaction to the conservatism of the art institutions in the Austrian capital. It is important to point out that the city was a cultural hub in which a lot of significant figures circulated and started developing their careers - for instance, Sigmund Freud was one of them.

From the very beginning of its activity, the movement proposed new philosophical and aesthetic standpoints. The Secessionists embraced various styles in order to establish their own heterogeneous creative vision; they were interested in the artistic production which went beyond the academic canons, so they proposed an aesthetic which was not rooted in historical art.

Gustav Klimt, who was already a prominent artist, was the first president of the Secession, while Rudolf von Alt was made an honorary president. The Secessionists published a magazine called Ver Sacrum which featured the most representative works of that time closely associated with the Art Nouveau movement and enforced the later development of Expressionism.

Throughout the years, the Vienna Secession organized a number of exhibitions which promoted not only their doings but of the international avant-garde as well. The specific focus on architecture and design resulted in founding the Wiener Werkstätte, or Vienna Workshops, in 1903, an enterprise influenced by the English Arts and Crafts movement.

Vienna Secession - One Of The First Modernist Art Movements

The Importance of Secession In Architecture

In 1898, the Vienna Secession group built their own exhibition space near the Karlsplatz town square. This astonishing structure was basically the first permanent exhibition space for contemporary art of all types. It was highly innovative since its interior provided a fluctuation between painting, sculpture, architecture and and graphic design.

The iconic construction was designed by Joseph Maria Olbrich, and it quickly became known solely as the Secession (die Sezession). It was financed by Karl Wittgenstein, the father of famous philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Various figures were involved in decoration - from Max Klinger and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, to Arnold Bocklin. Above its main entrance, the phrase Der Zeit ihre Kunst. Der Kunst ihre Freiheit (To every age its art. To every art it's freedom) is carved, which represents the motto of the movement. The main feature of the building is one of the most recognized artworks of Secession style - the Beethoven Frieze designed by Gustav Klimt.

Together with the architect Joseph Maria Olbrich, there were also his peers Josef Hoffmann and Otto Wagner; all of them were entirely focused on the introduction and use of purified and much simpler geometric forms. They were drawn by the neoclassical architecture which is then extended with the use of floral ornaments. One of the main characteristics of the Secessionists style was the facades covered with linear ornamentation in a form commonly called whiplash.

Gustav Klimt - The Beethoven Frieze, 1902

The Legacy Of Vienna Secession and its Art

The Vienna Secession was undoubtedly established to promote innovation in contemporary arts regardless of any particular style, yet it changed over the years since its members searched for new horizons are accepts current art tendencies. Finally, the internal divisions and commercialization of the movement rashly disrupted its activity.

Nevertheless, this phenomenon was a precedent in broader social context since it largely contributed to the rise of new intellectual and cultural climate in Vienna at the end of 19th and the begging of the 20th century. The domains of the Secessionist are still apparent in the city public space from the mentioned exhibition space (which is still being actively used for display of contemporary art), to Otto Wagner's The Karlsplatz Stadtbahn Station and permanent Klimt and Schiele installments at the Leopold Museum.

Furthermore, the Secessionist production is perceived as a pillar of the modern cultural identity of Austria. In November 2004, the state even issued the gold collectors' coin - the 100 euro Secession commemorative coin. The front side features the Secession building, while on the back a fragment of the Beethoven Frieze by Gustav Klimt is presented. Also, on the front side of the Austrian 50 cent coin, the Vienna Secession Building is represented within a circle symbolizing the birth of Art nouveau.

Editors' Tip: Viennese Secession (Art of Century)

Symbol of a forecasted revolution, the Viennese Secession possesses within itself the dissidence of about twenty talented artists against the conservative academicism which petrified Vienna and the whole Austro-Hungarian Empire at that time. Influenced by the Art Nouveau, the Secession, created in 1897 by Klimt, Moll and Hoffmann, was not an anonymous artistic revolution among so many others. Dissenting in essence, defining itself as an "art total", without any political or commercial constraint, it resembles more the philosophy that the ideological turmoil affected the craftsmen, architects, graphic artists and designers. Turning aside from the established art to dive into the generous and decorative shapes of Flora and the other nymphs, the artists open themselves to an aestheticism of which erotic power could only offend the bourgeoisie of the time.
Featured image: The secession building in Vienna, built in 1897 by Joseph Maria Olbrich for exhibitions of the Secession group. All images via creative commons.

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The Philosophy and Aesthetic of the Vienna Secession Movement | Widewalls

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There are several significant movements which marked the turn of the century, but certainly one of the most prolific ones was the Vienna Secession. It grew out of the revolt of the artists who were eager to question traditional understanding of what art is and what art should be in regards to the society.

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If you have been inspired and completed one of the challenges I spoke about in the first week- a specific research topic, an essay, a piece of creative writing or an art work or product or anything else of your choosing- please do e-mail me at b.gutman@shr.gdst.net- I would love to add them to this, for others to enjoy.......

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Joseph Koerner explores the art, architecture and music of fin de siecle Vienna, as he attempts to unlock the city's psyche for clues as to why it gave birth to modernism

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BBC Documentary on Vienna presented by Joseph Leo Koerner

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Carl Schorske

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5.3 British Library: VIenna-Modernity in the Making

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5.3 British Library: VIenna-Modernity in the Making

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An extraordinary number of ideas that shaped the 20th century can be traced back to Viennese culture between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the First World War. Andrea Gibbons explores the Austrian capital as a home to psychoanalysis, Zionism and Nazi ideology, among other political and artistic movements

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An extraordinary number of ideas that shaped the 20th century can be traced back to Viennese culture between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the First World War. Andrea Gibbons explores the Austrian capital as a home to psychoanalysis, Zionism and Nazi ideology, among other political and artistic movements.

A remarkable moment occurred in Vienna around the year 1900. As the Habsburg Empire and its values began to fragment and new demands for rights emerged, a cluster of artists, architects, musicians, social scientists and politicians would all experiment in ways that would transform their individual fields. Looking back at the art of Gustav Klimt, the architecture of Adolf Loos, the psychology of Sigmund Freud, the rising waves of socialism, feminism and the studies of Else Jerusalem, and the early political experiences of Adolf Hitler and Theodor Herzl, it is clear that this was a centre of creation for modernity as we know it.

Vienna's monumental Ringstrasse curls around the inner city. Built in the mid-19th century, it is a band of wide avenues, aristocratic facades for shops and residences, a parliament building and grand public museums in the stone forms of ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy. It replaced the medieval defences to encircle the old city of narrow streets and awkward angles along which you find the cathedral, medieval palaces and churches. The Ringstrasse represented the triumph of a new reality over a fading monarchy - liberalism's rise along with that of merchants and the middle classes.

Hitler stood here in the depths of poverty, and wrote that he could not take his eyes from these massive buildings.

Writer Stefan Zweig describes the age embodied by these same buildings as the 'golden age of security'. Everyone believed with utmost certainty in the slow and steady march of progress day by day. Yet this certainty had already begun to fragment along with the Habsburg Empire itself, even as the Ringstrasse was being completed. Czechs, Moravians and Bohemians were demanding self-rule and the right to their own languages, and Austria-Hungary played no role in the European scramble for African colonies. Doubt in the old certainties worked to melt down old ideals of morality and refashion the meaning of high culture.

The Vienna of this moment has almost become frozen in time for us now, as so many writers have studied and analysed it to try to understand why it became such a centre of innovation. In Carl Schorske's monumental work on fin-de-siècle Vienna, he argues that the decline of liberalism drove the bourgeoisie to experiment. Their inability to create political change caused them to focus their efforts on challenging aesthetics and values in the arts and social sciences above all else. For Steven Beller it was the clash within so many of the principal cultural figures of their Jewish background and the complexities of Vienna's anti-Semitism. These multiple retellings tend to circle around the same familiar names and events, a narrative often obscuring the breadth of the rebellion in the social and political sphere as well as that channelled away from it into art, aesthetics and the life of the mind.

Women's rights and Red Vienna

Women were part of this upheaval, demanding their political, economic and intellectual rights, sparking debates over the nature of gender and its appropriate roles as they forged their way into the arts, culture and music. Auguste Fickert, Rosa Mayreder and Marie Lang wrote and campaigned tirelessly. Else Jerusalem broke gender barriers in the social sciences to explore Vienna's underworld of poverty and prostitution. Their movement sometimes overlapped with that of the poor and the working classes who saw socialism as an answer to their poverty, poor housing, lack of power and opportunity and voice - Red Vienna would become famous as an attempt to create a socialist utopia amidst the inflation of the interwar years.

The formation of Nazi ideology

There also emerged another kind of politics in 'a sharper key' - populist, rabble-rousing, aggressive and threatening. Georg Ritter von Schönerer shouted and raged for German nationalism and anti-Semitism, Karl Lueger used the same impassioned style to ally anti-Semitism with a conservative Catholicism. Schorske argues that when Lueger formally took his place as Vienna's mayor in 1897, it signalled the end of classic liberalism. Adolf Hitler, living in poverty and frustrated as an artist, would adapt both their style and much of their content to the formation of Nazi ideology. Unsurprising then, that in this place and time Theodor Herzl would come slowly to his belief that Jews could only be safe in a homeland of their own, ushering Zionism into the world as a modern force.

Rebellion in the arts

This period of widespread social and moral crisis is the context for the rebellious movement within the arts and sciences that would help usher in modernity. Die Jungen, the youth, sought their own truth amidst the disintegration of the progress their parents had never questioned. Gustav Klimt led a group of artists to abandon the established art union. Known as the 'Secession', their motto was: 'To the Age its Art, to Art its Freedom'. For the first issue of the group's magazine Ver Sacrum ( Sacred Spring), Klimt drew Nuda veritas or Naked Truth. A nude woman holds up a mirror and forces her observers to look themselves in the face and confront what they see there. Elena Luksch-Makowsky and Teresa Ries, Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Shiele would all challenge ideals of beauty and the proper subjects for representation in their work, changing how people looked at art and artist, and how artists looked at themselves.

Nuda Veritas by Gustav Klimt

Gustav Klimt's painting, Nuda Veritas ( Naked Truth), epitomises the rebellious nature of the Secessionist art movement which challenged perceptions of art and the artist.

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Held by© Fine Art Images / Heritage Images / Getty Images

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud published On the Interpretation of Dreams in 1899. This keystone of psychoanalysis was built upon the analysis of his own dreams and the personal crises surrounding the death of his father, as well as the anti-Semitism underlying his professional stagnation and his political anxieties. Freud located the solution to these crises not in resolving an ugly political reality, but in working through incidents in his infancy, his youth and his sexuality, all made tangible through dreams. His focus on interiority and the power of the unconscious echoes on through the arts, and through everyday understandings of our own lives, where concepts like the Oedipal complex have become common currency. His ideas have played a central part in the way we view the self in the modern world, and the way in which we perceive and interpret the interplay between past and present. As Esther Leslie has written, '[Like Karl Marx], Freud set in motion an understanding of the ways in which the past works on the present and the present works on the past - for example, Freud's notion of Nachträglichkeit, deferred action, in which the past influences the present, and also perhaps the Freudian idea that memory's fragmented format highlights the role of forgetting and creative reconstruction of pasts in the present, as part of a shaping of a dynamic notion of the self'.

Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud in his office in Vienna, c. 1937

Sigmund Freud was the founder of psychoanalysis and his work permanently changed our understanding of the human unconscious.

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Held by© Bourgeron Collection / RDA / Hulton Archive / Getty Images

Adolf Loos and modernist architecture

Adolf Loos pioneered modern building, pushing forward the idea of an architecture stripped of ornament. Loos achieved this through his writing, some of it published in Ver Sacrum, and above all in the form of his buildings. He rejected facades and decoration to focus instead on the truths of a building's purpose, its interior spaces and the integrity of the materials used. The stark modern structures we take for granted were revolutionary then, their plainness standing in total opposition to the ornate Ringstrasse embodying the previous age. Loos designed the Café Museum, which would become a key gathering place for modernist artists and writers. (It is at least in part the sociability of Vienna's café culture that nurtured modernism, and created and sustained this rejection of the old to embrace change.)

Poster for a lecture: 'My House on Michaelerplatz' (Mein Haus am Michaelerplatz) by Adolf Loos

Adolf Loos was a pioneer of modern architecture who shunned ornamental features in favour of smooth clean lines; his was a modern aesthetic which redefined building design for the 20th century.

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Modernist music

Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven and Brahms all lived and composed in Vienna, and Strauss's waltz captured the essence of the gilded world of liberalism just as the Ringstrasse did. Gustav Mahler would help send the musical world crumbling before new forms, converting from Judaism to Catholicism in order to take up a post as conductor of the Vienna Court Opera between 1897 and 1907. Arnold Schoenberg would push even further into modernity, challenging classic perfections of consonance and harmony in his painting, but above all in his music. He sought beauty in entirely new forms and dissonances, opening up an entirely new range of possibility for composition. His invention of the 12-tone technique made complacency in art's consumption impossible, just as the Secession and Freud did for art and dreaming.

Old certainties gone, the whole city and the vast lengths of the Habsburg Empire stirred into fervour and turmoil through a process of disintegration that would lead up to the First World War. But before 1914 brought it crashing to a halt, Vienna enjoyed a rare moment of innovative aesthetic brilliance that continues to shape how we view the world today.

Banner credit: Getty Images/ Hulton Archive

Written by Andrea Gibbons

Dr Andrea Gibbons is an author and urban geographer specializing in the co-constitutive relationships between people and the cities in which they live. Bringing together political economy and cultural theory, her work has looked at the influence of race, gender, culture and social movement on cities through archival research, literature and ethnography. Her book Land, Privilege, Race: One Hundred Years of Struggle Against Segregation in Los Angeles is forthcoming from Verso.

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An extraordinary number of ideas that shaped the 20th century can be traced back to Viennese culture between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the First World War. Andrea Gibbons explores the Austrian capital as a home to psychoanalysis, Zionism and Nazi ideology, among other political and artistic movements.

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5.4 How Vienna Produced Ideas that shaped the West

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5.4 How Vienna Produced Ideas that shaped the West

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Looking back on the relatively short period in history-an interesting chapter from the book "Austira's Place in Europe and the World.

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An Interview with a clinical psychologist  to introduce Sigmund Freund

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5.6 How Jewish Was Fin de siècle Vienna?

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5.6 How Jewish Was Fin de siècle Vienna?

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How Jewish was Turn-of-the-Century Vienna - Prof. Thomas Kovach

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5.7 Karl Lueger, anti-semitism and his rise to power as Mayor of Vienna

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5.7 Karl Lueger, anti-semitism and his rise to power as Mayor of Vienna

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At the same time of the Borth of Modernism, there were others fighting against this tide

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With his persuasive but polarizing rhetoric, Karl Lueger won a convincing victory in the elections for Mayor of Vienna. However, the Jewish population and Emperor Franz Joseph I were anything but pleased at the outcome.

Here in our Austrian fatherland the situation is such that the Jews have seized a degree of influence which exceeds their number and importance. (Interjection: 'Very true!') In Vienna the poor craftsman has to go begging on Saturday afternoon, to turn the labour of his hands to account, he has to beg at the Jewish furniture dealer's. ('Quite right!') The influence on the masses, in our country, is in the hands of the Jews, the greater part of the press is in their hands, by far the largest part of all capital and, in particular, high finance, is in Jewish hands, and in this respect the Jews operate a terrorism of a kind that could hardly be worse. For us, in Austria, it is a matter of liberating Christian people from the hegemony of Jewry.

Lueger's aggressive political anti-Semitism is clearly expressed in this extract from one of his speeches. From a speech given by Mayor Karl Lueger at a meeting of the Christian Socialist Workers' Association held on 20 July 1899 in Vienna, in: Weiningers Nacht, Europa-Verlag, Vienna 1989.

The 'Aulic Councillor of the Revolution', as Victor Adler was known, was opposed by the 'Colossus of Vienna', Karl Lueger. As leader of the Christian Social Party, the latter drew his support from the small-scale traders who, particularly after the stock market crash of 1873, felt themselves increasingly threatened by capitalism. Lueger relied on anti-capitalist, anti-industrial and, above all, anti-Semitic propaganda. His extreme polarizing rhetoric was directed against those in power, liberals, capitalists and aristocrats. In the hostile image of the 'capitalist Jew' he saw the root of all evil. Many of the Jews living in Vienna had become established members of the educated and professional middle classes.

Lueger's authoritarian and anti-Semitic style of leadership - which Adolf Hitler also emulated and whose fatal consequences are well known - brought him victory in the 1895 election and thus the office of Mayor of Vienna. But he was only able to take up the office in 1897 after a number of repeated elections, since Emperor Franz Joseph had repeatedly refused to confirm his appointment because of his radical anti-Semitism.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the influence of the mass parties increasingly obliged Emperor Franz Joseph to acquiesce to the wishes of the population. Moreover, the conflicts between the various nationalities within the Empire became more and more aggressive. The Monarchy had become unstable, in terms of both foreign and domestic policy, and this was ultimately to lead to the outbreak of the First World War.

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With his persuasive but polarizing rhetoric, Karl Lueger won a convincing victory in the elections for Mayor of Vienna. However, the Jewish population and Emperor Franz Joseph I were anything but pleased at the outcome. Here in our Austrian fatherland the situation is such that the Jews have seized a degree of influence which exceeds their number and importance.

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5.8 A less than successful artist: Adolf Hitler

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5.8 A less than successful artist: Adolf Hitler

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BBC Four - Vienna: Empire, Dynasty and Dream, Episode 3, Vienna in 1908

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In 1908, 19 year old Adolf Hitler arrived in Vienna to become an artist in the city of art

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A whirl through Vienna's modernist era, 100 years on

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If you need a push to visit Vienna, here it is: 2018 marks a century since the end of the city's modernist era. To celebrate the creative output of Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg and many others, Austria's capital will host a huge number of exhibitions this year.

Fin-de-siècle Viennese culture was the envy of the liberal world. This year is the 100th anniversary of the deaths of four of the movement's leading lights: painters Klimt and Schiele, architect Otto Wagner and graphic artist Koloman Moser - though there were many others, too. Between 1890 and 1914 Austria was a gorgeous melting pot of ideas. The city was buoyed by the wealth of the Habsburg Empire - those guys loved a baroque palace, there's one on pretty much every street corner. Alongside them lived Jewish immigrants who had new money and full civil rights. This equality meant that they could build avant-garde houses, commission interesting artists and run salons where progressive politicians and establishment figures met and mingled with psychoanalysts, writers and painters.

This unique period deserves to be celebrated, so go and see the renovation of the art nouveau Secession Building - home to the modernist artists and the first European exhibition space dedicated to the movement. Head for the "Klimt Bridge" at the Kunst Historisches Museum - a viewing platform first made for the 150th anniversary of Klimt's birth which gives the perfect view of the artist's 13-painting cycle decorating the museum's arches and pillars. At the Leopold Museum there'll be a great Egon Schiele show which includes his poems and writing alongside the paintings for the first time. Mahler, Schoenberg, Wagner and many others will all be given their creative due. The Museumsquartier - a clever development of baroque and modern buildings situated in the former Habsburg court stables - houses nine of the city's major museums, so you'd have to be extremely lazy not to catch some of these shows during a visit.

But the city itself is the greatest exhibit. Walk the inner districts and you'll see the stark art nouveau architecture of the Austrian Post Savings Bank, the delicate flowers decorating the tiled Majolica House on Linke Wienzeile, and the white and gilded domes and facades of the underground stations at Karlsplatz and Kettenbrückengasse, all monuments to Wagner's skill. (If you visit the Majolica House, stroll through the Naschmarkt, a food and flea market that's been there since the 16th century. Don't leave without eating some of the local cheese or flicking through the vinyl.)

The Vienna Workshop was a commune of applied artists established in 1903 who created modernist furniture, jewellery and ceramics - and if you head to the city's shops, you can still find a rare mix of traditional craftwork and modernist treasures on sale. Lobmeyr is famous for chandeliers, but drinking glasses by Josef Hoffmann and Adolf Loos are bestsellers in their shop on Kärntner strasse. Similarly, Wiener Silber Manufactur has Koloman Moser boxes alongside contemporary silverware in their boutique and designer Vally Wieselthier's china is available at Augarten 's chinaware store.

Finish your window shopping with a cocktail at the American Bar. The mirrored and tiled interior is the work of modernist architect Adolf Loos and it's been the drinking hole of choice for everyone from Jean Cocteau to Quentin Tarantino. You can still smoke inside here and many other bars in Austria, though hurry - a ban is being mooted by Parliament.

To go the full modernist, stay at the boutique Hotel Topazz. Murals in its rooms pay homage to the Vienna Workshop artists and the unusual oval windows across its facade play on a Koloman Moser design. It's also cosy and the views from the rooftop bar it shares with sister establishment Hotel Lamée, are something else.

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Window on to Vienna: Hotel Topazz. Photograph: Anna Blau

Oh, and if you're enjoying the idea of art in everyday city life, then do head to Am Hof Square in the old town. Olafur Eliasson may not be part of the modernist movement, but his light installation Yellow Fog drifts across the front of the Verbund-Gebäudes building here each night. It reminds me of director John Carpenter as much as anything else but in a city of statues and monuments, it's a great change of pace.

Luckily those modernists were a sensible bunch. They may have rethought art as we know it, but they didn't mess with tradition when it came to local food. If you're into faddy clean eating, then you need to rethink your life on many levels, but for now, let's focus on the fact that you will find eating in Vienna stressful. This is a meaty, potatoey, buttery, offaly, cakey kind of city, and all the better for it. If you genuinely care about the provenance and preparation of your food, you'll be happy here. Most of the wine and beer is extremely local - produced within the city walls - the meat is organic and this is the only city I've ever been to where the waiter boasts about the purity of the tap water as they put it on the table. Fresh from the mountains, apparently.

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Exhibitionist: the recently renovated Secession Building. Photograph: Christian Stemper/Peter Rigaud

There are many amazing traditional restaurants. I can't recommend Lugeck, with its swimming-pool tiles and beer-glass chandeliers, highly enough. The sausage, strudels and salads here are outstanding. Petz im Gusshaus, where the menu is created from what the chef finds in the local market each day, is great for offal. No, really. Especially the offal pasta. Keep your fingers crossed that there are some lungs in the market when you visit. Beuschel - calf lungs - is a traditional Viennese dish.

But there are also smart new takes on the old school in this vibrant, forward thinking city. The name Meissl & Schadn is a Viennese restaurant legend, but their new premises, just opened at the Hotel Grand Ferdinand, feeds modern versions of the boiled beef and schnitzels of yore to sophisticated diners in polonecks who look like graphic designers (and probably are: this city is still a hotbed of creativity). Or try Labstelle, which is cool but cosy and unpretentious, and has a great cocktail menu to sample alongside their Austrian cuisine.

Vienna has won the award of most liveable city an amazing eight times now. And you really should come and see why. This year's centenary offers a unique insight into its history but there's a thoroughly modern city to be discovered, too.

Way to go
Flights with My Austrian airline from £93 (austrian.com). Rooms at Hotel Topazz (hoteltopazz.com) from £139. For more information about events to mark the centenary of Viennese modernism, go to wien.info Topics

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A whirl through Vienna's modernist era, 100 years on

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If you need a push to visit Vienna, here it is: 2018 marks a century since the end of the city's modernist era. To celebrate the creative output of Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg and many others, Austria's capital will host a huge number of exhibitions this year.

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1.2 What is Viennese modernism?

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What is Viennese Modernism? A short introduction

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1.3  Find out about the Austro-Hungarian Empire.     

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1.3  Find out about the Austro-Hungarian Empire.     

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Vienna-Empire, Dynasty
Watch episode 3. (If you are interested, you may like to watch episodes 1 and 2 to understand the history of the  Habsburg Empire)

Find out about the Austro-Hungarian Empire. From 1804 to 1867 the Habsburg Monarchy was formally unified as the Austrian Empire, and from 1867 to 1918 as the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It collapsed following defeat in the First World War.

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Vienna was the capital of the Habsburg dynasty and home to the Holy Roman Emperors. From here, they dominated middle Europe for nearly 1,000 years. In this series, historian Simon Sebag Montefiore describes how the Habsburgs transformed Vienna into a multi-national city of music, culture and ideas. Napoleon, Hitler, Mozart, Strauss, Freud, Stalin and Klimt all played their part.

Vienna: Empire, Dynasty and Dream ep. 1 - Rise of the Habsburg Empire

We follow the Habsburgs' rise to power and discover how Vienna marked Europe's front line in the struggle to defend both Christendom from the Ottomans and the Catholic Church from the Protestant revolutionaries that plotted to destroy it.

Vienna: Empire, Dynasty and Dream ep. 2 - Vienna Triumphant

After the Ottoman threat receded at the end of the 17th century, the city was rebuilt. No longer an outpost defending the West from Islamic invaders, the Habsburgs vowed their empire and imperial capital would become the most glittering in the world. The Habsburg emperors transformed the city from a fortress into a great cultural capital. Vienna became a city that would define the arts; a magnet for musicians including Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven.

Vienna: Empire, Dynasty and Dream ep. 3 - Habsburg Extinction

From his struggles with Napoleon III and Bismarck and the suicide of his son Rudolf, to the assassination of his beautiful wife Sisi, Emperor Franz Josef's empire and his family proved impossible to control. But while the Habsburgs headed for extinction, Vienna blossomed. As the theories of Freud and the sensuality of the secession artists like Klimt and Schiele ushered in the modern age, Hitler and Stalin stalked her streets. It was here that World War I was sparked; it was here World War II was dreamed.

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Vienna: Empire, Dynasty and Dream - the capital of the Habsburg dynasty

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Vienna was the capital of the Habsburg dynasty and home to the Holy Roman Emperors. From here, they dominated middle Europe for nearly 1,000 years. In this series, historian Simon Sebag Montefiore describes how the Habsburgs transformed Vienna into a multi-national city of music, culture and ideas.

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Further links on the above programme from the Open University

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Simon Sebag Montefiore tells the story of how the Habsburg family transformed Vienna into the capital that it is today, during a dynasty era lasting nearly 1,000 years.

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Genius of the Modern World

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The Modern World Genius Episode 3 - Sigmund Freud

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Sigmund Freud (German: ˈziːkmʊnt ˈfʁɔʏt; born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 - 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient and a psychoanalyst. Freud was born to Galician Jewish parents in the Moravian town of Freiberg, in the Austrian Empire.

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What is the Vienna Secession and who were the main exponents?

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"Enough of censorship. I am having recourse to self-help. I want to get out."

The Vienna Secession was created as a reaction to the conservatism of the artistic institutions in the Austrian capital at the end of the 19 th century. It literally consisted of a set of artists who broke away from the association that ran the city's own venue for contemporary art to form their own, progressive group along with a venue to display their work.

The Vienna Secession's work is often referred to (during the years before World War I) as the Austrian version of Jugendstil, the German term for Art Nouveau, and it is the work of its members in association with that style that has contributed most to its fame, particularly outside of Austria. The Secession's most dramatic decline in fortunes occurred at virtually the same time that Jugendstil fell out of style elsewhere in Europe. When most people speak of the Vienna Secession, they are usually referring to the initial period of its history between 1897 and 1905.

The Secession was in large part responsible for the meteoric rise to international fame of several of its members, including Gustav Klimt, Joseph Maria Olbrich, Koloman Moser, and Josef Hoffmann, who helped to a large extent put Austrian art back on the map during the first two decades of the 20 th century and beyond.

The Secession's building created the first dedicated, permanent exhibition space for contemporary art of all types in the West. It gave a physical form and geographic location to designers committed to narrowing the gap in prestige between the fine arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture and the decorative and graphic arts, along with encouraging the exchanges between these genres.

Since the Secession was founded to promote innovation in contemporary art and not to foster the development of any one style, the formal and discursive aspects of its members' work have changed over the years in keeping with current trends in the art world. It still exists and its famed building still functions as both an exhibition space for contemporary art and a location that displays the work of its famous founding members.

Gustav Klimt framed his Nuda Veritas (1899), a nude young woman facing the viewer, with lines from Friedrich Schiller's poem "If you cannot please everyone with your actions and your art, you should satisfy a few. To please many is dangerous." He thus created a potent symbol of the Vienna Secession and expressed its artistic defiance.

The Vienna Secession Beginnings and Development

The Vienna Secession Concepts, Trends, and Related Topics

The Vienna Secession Later Developments and Legacy

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"Enough of censorship. I am having recourse to self-help. I want to get out." The Vienna Secession was created as a reaction to the conservatism of the artistic institutions in the Austrian capital at the end of the 19 th century.

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Pay particular attention to Klimt's Beethoven Frieze

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Begründer der Pyschoanalyse (article in German)

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Sigmund Freud -
Erfinder der Psychoanalyse
Sigmund Freud (1856 - 1939) gilt als einer der einflussreichsten Wissenschaftler seiner Zeit. Er machte es sich zur Aufgabe, die Psyche des Menschen zu verstehen und entwickelte dazu viele Theorien und Methoden. Sein Lebenswerk, die Psychoanalyse, wird bis heute unterrichtet und genutzt, aber auch kritisch diskutiert.
Ausgabe Nr. 82, Seite 18 - 19

Der Eigenart des Psychischen können wir nicht durch lineare Konturen gerecht werden wie in einer Zeichnung, eher durch verschwimmende Farbenfelder wie bei den modernen Malern", sagte Freud einmal in einer Vorlesung. Er beschäftigte sich sein Leben lang mit der menschlichen Psyche, um eine Struktur in unserem Denken und Handeln zu finden. Mit seinen Theorien zu Träumen und dem Unbewussten hat Freud den Blick auf das menschliche Denken verändert. „Manche verehren ihn heute wie ein Idol", sagt Eric Kandel, Neurobiologe und Nobelpreisträger für Medizin. „Freud hat sehr gute Erkenntnisse gewonnen, aber auch Fehler gemacht." Deshalb sei es wichtig, sich mit Freuds Theorien kritisch auseinanderzusetzen und seine Gedanken weiterzuentwickeln.
Ursachen psychischer Erkrankungen
Sigmund Freud wurde 1856 in Freiberg - damals Teil der Habsburger Monarchie, heute Příbor in Tschechien - geboren. Die Familie zog bald nach Wien. Schon während seiner Schulzeit interessierte sich Freud für Naturwissenschaften und Philosophie. Später studierte er Medizin, bekam mit 25 Jahren den Doktortitel und wurde wenig später Professor. Nach Forschungen in Paris eröffnete Freud 1886 eine Praxis für Nervenheilkunde in Wien. Durch den Einsatz von Hypnose wollte er unbewusste Gedanken seiner Patienten aufdecken. Verdrängte Erlebnisse aus der Kindheit sah Freud als Ursache von psychischen Erkrankungen. Er ging davon aus, dass die Interpretation von Träumen bei der Behandlung helfen könnte..
Das Ich, das Es und das Über-Ich
Weltweit bekannt wurde Freud mit seinem „Strukturmodell der Psyche" und der darauf aufbauenden Psychoanalyse. Für Freud besteht die Psyche aus drei Teilen: dem Ich, dem Es und dem Über-Ich. Das Ich ist das Bewusstsein des Menschen, das mit der Außenwelt kommuniziert. Das Es ist das Unbewusste, die Bedürfnisse und Triebe des Menschen. Die wichtigsten Triebe sind
laut Freud der Lebens- oder Sexualtrieb und der Todestrieb. Das Ich (das Bewusste) ist der vernünftige Teil der Seele, kontrolliert das Es und versucht dessen Bedürfnisse zu befriedigen. Die Kontrolle der Triebe sorgt dafür, dass das Verhalten eines Menschen nicht gegen gesellschaftliche Tabus verstößt. Dafür ist das Über-Ich nötig. Es übernimmt eine Art Elternrolle in der Psyche. Im Über-Ich sind Werte verankert, also Vorstellungen darüber, was gut und was böse ist. So können im Ich Schuldgefühle oder ein schlechtes Gewissen entstehen.
Die Psychoanalyse
Mit der Psychoanalyse versuchte Freud, Menschen mit psychischen Erkrankungen zu therapieren. Nach ersten Versuchen, durch die Hypnose in das Unbewusste (das Es) vorzudringen, entwickelte er die Methode der freien Assoziation. Der Patient spricht frei heraus, was ihm gerade durch den Kopf geht. Der Therapeut versucht, diese Gedanken gemäß Freuds Modell zu deuten und bespricht diese Deutung mit dem Patienten. Freud entschlüsselte auch symbolische Botschaften in Träumen. Hinter diesen Botschaften stehen laut Freud Triebe des Es, die nicht ausgelebt werden können. Dadurch wird der Traum zum Fenster ins Unbewusste des Menschen.
Rezeption und Wirkung
Mit dem Versuch, die Psyche des Menschen wissenschaftlich zu erklären, war Freud ein Pionier. Dass es bei einem Versuch blieb und er seine Theorien nicht wissenschaftlich belegen konnte, brachte ihm schon zu Lebzeiten viel Kritik ein. Dennoch wurden manche seiner Ideen ein wesentlicher Bestandteil der modernen Neurowissenschaft. „Freuds Theorie, dass der größte Teil unseres Seelenlebens unbewusst bleibt, ist heute Konsens in der Wissenschaft", erklärt Neurobiologe Eric Kandel. Freud lebte und arbeitete fast 50 Jahre mit seiner Familie in der Berggasse 19 in Wien. Dort ist heute das Freud-Museum untergebracht. Nach der Machtübernahme der Nationalsozialisten 1938 musste die Familie, die jüdischer Abstammung war, aus Österreich fliehen. Sie emigrierte nach London, wo Freud ein Jahr später mit 83 Jahren verstarb. Trotz aller Kritik steht fest: Sigmund Freud legte die Basis für die moderne Psychologie.

Der freudsche Versprecher

Ein Politiker soll eine wichtige Sitzung eröffnen. „Hiermit erkläre ich diese Sitzung für geschlossen", sagt er bei der Begrüßung feierlich. Offensichtlich wollte der Redner die Sitzung lieber beenden als eröffnen. Unfreiwillig erzählte er das seinen Zuhörern. Diese psychische „Fehlleistung" geht, so Freud, auf das Unbewusste zurück, das in dem Moment stärker ist als das Bewusste. Noch heute spricht man vom „freudschen Versprecher", wenn jemand sagt, was er denkt, ohne es zu wollen. Neurolinguistische Untersuchungen ergaben aber, dass das Gehirn beim Sprechen manchmal physiologisch nicht korrekt arbeitet. Nicht jeder Versprecher ist also ein „freudscher Versprecher".
Christina Liebhart
Fotos: Tullio Saba/flickr.com (Sigmund Freud am Arbeitsplatz),
Max Halberstadt/wikimedia.org (Sigmund Freud Porträt)

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Leseprobe aus Nr. 82 - Deutsch lernen mit vitamin de

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Sigmund Freud - Erfinder der Psychoanalyse Sigmund Freud (1856 - 1939) gilt als einer der einflussreichsten Wissenschaftler seiner Zeit. Er machte es sich zur Aufgabe, die Psyche des Menschen zu verstehen und entwickelte dazu viele Theorien und Methoden. Sein Lebenswerk, die Psychoanalyse, wird bis heute unterrichtet und genutzt, aber auch kritisch diskutiert.

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Bringing together of the Arts: Mahler, Klimt, Beethoven.....

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4.2.4  Get a copy and read: A Case of Hysteria (Dora)

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4.2.4  Get a copy and read: A Case of Hysteria (Dora)

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Sigmund Freud

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Who was the brilliant writer?

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Arthur Schnitzler (15 May 1862 - 21 October 1931) was an Austrian author and dramatist.

Arthur Schnitzler was born at Praterstrasse 16, Leopoldstadt, Vienna, capital of the Austrian Empire (as of 1867, part of the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary). He was the son of a prominent Hungarian laryngologist, Johann Schnitzler (1835-1893), and Luise Markbreiter (1838-1911), a daughter of the Viennese doctor Philipp Markbreiter. His parents were both from Jewish families. In 1879 Schnitzler began studying medicine at the University of Vienna and in 1885 he received his doctorate of medicine. He began work at Vienna's General Hospital (German: Allgemeines Krankenhaus der Stadt Wien), but ultimately abandoned the practice of medicine in favour of writing.

On 26 August 1903, Schnitzler married Olga Gussmann (1882-1970), a 21-year-old aspiring actress and singer who came from a Jewish middle-class family. They had a son, Heinrich (1902-1982), born on 9 August 1902. In 1909 they had a daughter, Lili, who committed suicide in 1928. The Schnitzlers separated in 1921. Schnitzler died on 21 October 1931 in Vienna of a brain hemorrhage. In 1938, following the Anschluss, his son Heinrich went to the United States and did not return to Austria until 1959; he is the father of the Austrian musician and conservationist Michael Schnitzler, born in 1944 in Berkeley, California, who moved to Vienna with his parents in 1959.

Schnitzler's works were often controversial, both for their frank description of sexuality (in a letter to Schnitzler Sigmund Freud confessed "I have gained the impression that you have learned through intuition - although actually as a result of sensitive introspection - everything that I have had to unearth by laborious work on other persons") and for their strong stand against anti-semitism, represented by works such as his play Professor Bernhardi and his novel Der Weg ins Freie. However, although Schnitzler was Jewish, Professor Bernhardi and Fräulein Else are among the few clearly identified Jewish protagonists in his work.

Schnitzler was branded as a pornographer after the release of his play , in which 10 pairs of characters are shown before and after the sexual act, leading and ending with a prostitute. The furor after this play was couched in the strongest anti-semitic terms. Reigen was made into a French language film in 1950 by the German-born director Max Ophüls as . The film achieved considerable success in the English-speaking world, with the result that Schnitzler's play is better known there under its French title. Richard Oswald's film The Merry-Go-Round (1920), Roger Vadim's Circle of Love (1964) and Otto Schenk's Der Reigen (1973) also are based on the play. More recently, in Fernando Meirelles' film , Schnitzler's play was provided with a new version as has been the case with many other TV and film productions.

In the novella Fräulein Else (1924) Schnitzler may be rebutting a contentious critique of the Jewish character by Otto Weininger (1903) by positioning the sexuality of the young female Jewish protagonist. The story, a first-person stream of consciousness narrative by a young aristocratic woman, reveals a moral dilemma that ends in tragedy.

In response to an interviewer who asked Schnitzler what he thought about the critical view that his works all seemed to treat the same subjects, he replied "I write of love and death. What other subjects are there?" Despite his seriousness of purpose, Schnitzler frequently approaches the bedroom farce in his plays (and had an affair with Adele Sandrock, one of his actresses). Professor Bernhardi, a play about a Jewish doctor who turns away a Catholic priest in order to spare a patient the realization that she is on the point of death, is his only major dramatic work without a sexual theme.

A member of the avant-garde group Young Vienna ( Jung-Wien), Schnitzler toyed with formal as well as social conventions. With his 1900 novella Leutnant Gustl, he was the first to write German fiction in stream-of-consciousness narration. The story is an unflattering portrait of its protagonist and of the army's obsessive code of formal honor. It caused Schnitzler to be stripped of his commission as a reserve officer in the medical corps - something that should be seen against the rising tide of anti-semitism of the time.

He specialized in shorter works like novellas and one-act plays. And in his short stories like "The Green Tie" ("Die grüne Krawatte") he showed himself to be one of the early masters of microfiction. However he also wrote two full-length novels: Der Weg ins Freie about a talented but not very motivated young composer, a brilliant description of a segment of pre-World War I Viennese society; and the artistically less satisfactory .

In addition to his plays and fiction, Schnitzler meticulously kept a diary from the age of 17 until two days before his death. The manuscript, which runs to almost 8,000 pages, is most notable for Schnitzler's casual descriptions of sexual conquests; he was often in relationships with several women at once, and for a period of some years he kept a record of every orgasm. Collections of Schnitzler's letters also have been published.

Schnitzler's works were called "Jewish filth" by Adolf Hitler and were banned by the Nazis in Austria and Germany. In 1933, when Joseph Goebbels organized book burnings in Berlin and other cities, Schnitzler's works were thrown into flames along with those of other Jews, including Einstein, Marx, Kafka, Freud and Stefan Zweig.

His novella Fräulein Else has been adapted a number of times, including the German silent film Fräulein Else (1929), starring Elisabeth Bergner, and the 1946 Argentine film The Naked Angel, starring Olga Zubarry.

Anatol (1893), a series of seven acts revolving around a bourgeois playboy and his immature relationships.

Flirtation (Liebelei - 1895), also known as The Reckoning, which was made into a film by Max Ophüls in 1933, and Pierre Gaspard-Huit in 1958 (), and also adapted as by Tom Stoppard (1986) and Sweet Nothings by David Harrower for the Young Vic in 2010.

Fair Game (Freiwild - 1896)

Light-'O-Love (1896)

Reigen (1897), more usually called is still frequently presented. Max Ophüls directed the first movie adaptation of the play in 1950; Roger Vadim directed a second version in 1964, and Otto Schenk a third version in 1973. In 1998, it was reworked by British playwright David Hare as The Blue Room. It was also adapted by theatrical songwriter Michael John LaChiusa into an Off-Broadway musical called Hello Again in 1994. Suzanne Bachner did a modern adaptation called "Circle" about 21st-century sexual mores in 2002.

Paracelsus (1899)

The Green Cockatoo (Der grüne Kakadu - 1899). Composer Richard Mohaupt adapted the play and created 1954-1956 the one-act opera Der grüne Kakadu, which premiered at the Hamburg State Opera on September 16, 1958.

The Lonely Way (Der einsame Weg - 1904)

Intermezzo (Zwischenspiel - 1904)

Der Ruf des Lebens (1906)

Countess Mizzi or the Family Reunion (Komtesse Mizzi oder Der Familientag - 1907)

Living Hours (1911)

Young Medardus (Der junge Medardus - 1910)

The Vast Domain (Das weite Land - 1911). The play was adapted as Undiscovered Country by Tom Stoppard (1979). Three film versions of this play have been made, the first by Ernst Lothar in 1960 with Attila Hörbiger as Hofreiter, the second by Peter Beauvais in 1970 with O. W. Fischer, the third one in 1986 by Luc Bondy and starring Michel Piccoli.

Professor Bernhardi (1912)

The Comedy of Seduction (Komödie der Verführung - 1924)

Comedies of Words and Other Plays (1917)

None but the Brave (Leutnant Gustl - 1900)

Berta Garlan (1900)

Blind Geronimo and his Brother (Der blinde Geronimo und sein Bruder - 1902)

The Prophecy (Die Weissagung - 1905)

Casanova's Homecoming (Casanovas Heimfahrt - 1918)

Fräulein Else (1924)

Rhapsody - also published as Dream Story (Traumnovelle - 1925/26), later adapted as the film Eyes Wide Shut by American director Stanley Kubrick

Night Games (Spiel im Morgengrauen - 1926)

Flight into Darkness (Flucht in die Finsternis - 1931)

The Death of a Bachelor

Late Fame (2014)

Youth in Vienna (Jugend in Wien), an autobiography published posthumously in 1968

Diary, 1879-1931

Theodor Reik, Arthur Schnitzler als Psychologe (Minden, 1913)

H. B. Samuel, Modernities (London, 1913)

J. G. Huneker, Ivory, Apes, and Peacocks (New York, 1915)

Ludwig Lewisohn, The Modern Drama (New York, 1915)

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Arthur Schnitzler (15 May 1862 - 21 October 1931) was an Austrian author and dramatist. Arthur Schnitzler was born at Praterstrasse 16, Leopoldstadt, Vienna, capital of the Austrian Empire (as of 1867, part of the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary).

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A Lecture from the Getty Research Institute. His grandson also discusses his Grandfather's work

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Arthur Schnitzler and Vienna 1900 (Video 1 of 2)

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Panel discussion after the lexture

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Arthur Schnitzler and Vienna 1900 (Video 2 of 2)

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"Dream  Story" in English or in German

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Die Traumnovelle

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4.3.4 Or watch Standley Kubrick's adaptation "Eyes Wide Shut"

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4.3.4 Or watch Standley Kubrick's adaptation "Eyes Wide Shut"

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3.6 Leopold Museum: another extraordinary museum.....

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3.6 Leopold Museum: another extraordinary museum.....

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Birth of Modernism

From 16th March 2019

Tabs

WIEN 1900 | Film

WIEN 1900 | Experts

WIEN 1900 | Teaser

W24 Spezial | Wien um 1900: Metropole zwischen Glanz & Elend

Die kaiserliche Residenzstadt stand um das Jahr 1900 in voller Blüte: Zentrum eines Weltreichs mit gut 50 Millionen Einwohnern samt Höchstleistungen in Architektur, Musik, Malerei & Literatur. Neben all dem Prunk gab es aber auch Not & Elend - und erste Anzeichen einer nahenden Katastrophe.

Mit:
- Hans-Peter Wipplinger, Direktor Leopold Museum
- Patrick Werkner, Kunsthistoriker & emeritierter Hochschullehrer
- Helmut Wohnout, Generaldirektor Österreichisches Staatsarchiv

Nachzusehen in der W24 Mediathek: w24.at

Audioguide App zum Download:

With its newly conceived presentation of the collection, the Leopold Museum is creating an opulent tableau which affords uniquely rich and complex insights into the fascination of Vienna around 1900 and the atmosphere of this vibrant time.

Around the turn of the century, the Danube metropolis was the capital of both the high nobility and of liberal intellectuals, of the splendid Ringstrasse and endless slum areas, of anti-Semitism and Zionism, of a rigid conservatism and emerging Modernism. Splendor and squalor, dream and reality, dissolution of the self and new beginning characterize the esthetic pluralism and mark the Vienna of that time as a place of experimentation and a laboratory of ideas - and thus as a central motor to a turbulent movement of renewal. This heterogeneous atmosphere - Arnold Schönberg spoke of an "emancipation of dissonance" - provided the setting for the unique consolidation of cultural efforts that today makes us look upon the period of Vienna around 1900 as the source of Modernism. This departure unfolded in various disciplines, from painting and the graphic arts via literature, music, theater, dance and architecture, all the way to medicine, psychology, philosophy, jurisprudence and economics. Comprising some 1300 exhibits and spanning three floors, the exhibition presents the splendor and wealth of artistic and intellectual achievements of this era through masterpieces from the Leopold Museum as well as eminent permanent loans from Austrian and international collections.

The exhibition is created under the curatorial aegis of Hans-Peter Wipplinger and in dialogue with experts in various fields.

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From 16th March 2019 Die kaiserliche Residenzstadt stand um das Jahr 1900 in voller Blüte: Zentrum eines Weltreichs mit gut 50 Millionen Einwohnern samt Höchstleistungen in Architektur, Musik, Malerei & Literatur. Neben all dem Prunk gab es aber auch Not & Elend - und erste Anzeichen einer nahenden Katastrophe.

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4.4 Article on "Arts in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna – Music, Art and Architecture"

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4.4 Article on "Arts in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna – Music, Art and Architecture"

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Ravel's composition 'La Valse', written at the close of World War I, can be seen as a parable of the violent death of 19th century Vienna - with "the waltz, long a symbol of gay Vienna, becoming in the composer's hands a frantic Danse Macabre" (Carl Schorske - Fin de Siècle Vienna - Politics and Culture, Vintage Book Edition 1981, pp. 3 and 4). Ravel himself wrote: " I feel this work as a kind of apotheosis of the Viennese waltz, linked in my mind with the impression of a fantastic whirl of destiny". Indeed, the composition opens with the introduction of different individual parts which then unify into the whole. Slowly, different elements are introduced: " fragments of waltz themes, scattered over a brooding stillness. Gradually the parts find each other - the martial fanfare, the vigorous trot, the sweet obligato, the sweeping major melody. Each element is drawn, its own momentum magnetized, into the wider whole... The pace accelerates; almost imperceptibly the sweeping rhythm passes over into the compulsive, then into the frenzied ... At the very end, when the waltz crashes in a cataclysm of sound, each theme continues to breathe its individuality, eccentric and distorted now, in the chaos of totality" (Schorske, ibid) - with harmony becoming cacophony.

La Valse (version for Orchestra)
Berlin Symphony Orchestra / Gunther Herbig

Indeed, philosophers, writers, artists and musicians at that time felt the dissolution of their universe as intensely as Ravel conveys in ' La Valse', and nowhere else in Europe were these changes so deeply felt and compressed as in Vienna in the years from about 1890 to about 1938.

In this article, I will concentrate on the events starting at the beginning of 19th century which are fundamental to understanding Vienna's Fin de Siècle culture, with its profound changes in architecture, art and music, which will be the focus of my next three articles over the next several months.

The French Revolution in 1789 precipitated the fall of the Ancien Régime with ramifications for monarchies and societies in the rest of Europe. In the Habsburg Empire, Francis I had to resign as Holy Roman Emperor (with 'encouragement' from Napoléon I), and was reduced to being just Emperor of Austria. The rise of the liberal middle class, with its demands for constitutional reforms, and the demands of workers for their rights, spurred by the Industrial Revolution, were expressed in the revolutions of 1830, 1848 and 1868. In architecture, art and music the changes from the Classical to the Romantic period, which I have discussed in previous articles, also had significant impact. Artists, musicians and writers, formerly employed at the royal courts of Europe, were now obliged to seek independent employment - as was the "First Generation" in Vienna - Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert.

In Austria, the early 19th century is generally known as the Biedermeier period. The name itself is taken from a literary character (from Vienna's Fliegende Blätter) - ' bieder' - translated as ' simple', and ' meier' as any ' Jones or Smith' - any ordinary man. In architecture and furniture, the Biedermeier style was usually seen as a poor copy of the aristocratic style of the salons of royalty - although today Biedermeier furniture commands exorbitant prices in auction houses.

Paintings of the period also reflect a changed subject matter - here ' Wine, Women and Song' - ordinary Viennese in the countryside, enjoying themselves. The subject matter of genre paintings in general changed to ordinary people, showing them during their daily activities, such as a flower seller; cityscapes, such as Vienna's Naschmarkt (food market), but also depicting the destitute, the disadvantaged, living on the margin of Viennese society.

Turning to music, Franz Schubert was the only native Viennese amongst the composers of the 'First Generation'. He was a Vienna Choirboy, but later turned to composing, when his voice changed. Schubert surrounded himself with a circle of friends including Johann Michael Vogl (famous baritone who performed Schubert's Lieder/Songs), Anselm Hűttenbrenner (composer), Franz von Schober (actor) Johann Mayrhofer (poet), Joseph von Spaun (friend and financial supporter) and painters Leopold Kupelwieser and Moritz von Schwind. Known almost only through his songs, most of Schubert's major compositions were neither published nor performed in his lifetime.

Schubert and his friends would meet for musical evenings (called ' Schubertiade') including games and excursions to the Vienna Woods, escaping overcrowded Vienna, where death, disease and poverty were all too present. Schubert's song cycle, Die Winterreise, which he was still editing before his untimely death, has the theme of death/winter central to the composition. The titles range from ' Frozen Tears, Solitude, The Raven, Last Hope, The Hurdy Gurdy Man', just to name a few. Piano and voice are equal elements in the composition. In the Hurdy-Gurdy Man, the sparseness of the piano and voice conveys a profound image of death and stillness, which is, of course, the very essence of the Winterreise - a journey through a winter landscape, a metaphor for the end of life.

Many of the societal and cultural changes in the early years of the 19th century would lead to the great upheaval which brought on the revolutions of 1848 - in which workers and the liberal middle class rose in opposition to Chancellor Fűrst Metternich and Emperor Ferdinand I, who resigned in favor of his nephew, Franz Josef. During his reign, the city of Vienna became what it is today - with the 'Ringstrasse' (Ringstreet) buildings bringing a physical and psychological transformation important to the evolution of the Fin de Siècle culture - which will be the subject of my next article.

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Fin-de-Siècle Vienna - Music, Art and Architecture

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Ravel's composition 'La Valse', written at the close of World War I, can be seen as a parable of the violent death of 19th century Vienna - with "the waltz, long a symbol of gay Vienna, becoming in the composer's

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3.5 Visit the Belvedere Museum Live Onlineand get lost in this amazing museum...

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3.5 Visit the Belvedere Museum Live Onlineand get lost in this amazing museum...

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Das Museum Geschichte Geschichte Belvedere 21 Biografie Prinz Eugen Architektur OB Architektur UB Architektur B21 Gärten Artothek des Bundes Wotruba Depot und Studiensaal Blickle Kino

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Documentary about Wittgenstein and Schoenberg, 1985 (you need to click on link-watch on you tube)

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The Language Of The New Music - Documentary about Wittgenstein and Schoenberg, 1985

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Vienna: Heart of Modernity

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Vienna 1900, The Heart of Modernity | Behind the Glass Lecture

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FInd out about the composer Gustav Mahler, his life and works.

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Keeping Score | Gustav Mahler: Origins (FULL DOCUMENTARY AND CONCERT)

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4.7 Read the academic paper on "Strindberg and Musical Expressionism in VIenna."

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4.7 Read the academic paper on "Strindberg and Musical Expressionism in VIenna."

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4.8 Fin-de-siècle Vienna: mental illness and modernism

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4.8 Fin-de-siècle Vienna: mental illness and modernism

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4.9 Being Modern: a very interesting article on science and modernism

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4.9 Being Modern: a very interesting article on science and modernism

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3.8 .1 GUSTAV KLIMT
Tate exhibition of Gustav Klimt

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Gustav Klimt exhibition at Tate Liverpool

To celebrate 2008 as European Capital of Culture Tate Liverpool is delighted to present the first comprehensive exhibition of Gustav Klimt 's work ever staged in the UK.

The exhibition focuses on the life and art of one of the world's most influential and revered artists. It will explore Klimt's role as the founder and leader of the Viennese Secession, a progressive group of artists and artisans. The work and philosophy of the Secession embraced art, architecture, fashion, dazzling decorative objects and furniture in their search for identity.

Major paintings and drawings from all stages of Klimt's career will be shown alongside the work of Josef Hoffmann, the architect and designer and a close friend of the

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Gustav Klimt: Painting, Design and Modern Life in Vienna 1900 - Exhibition at Tate Liverpool | Tate

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To celebrate 2008 as European Capital of Culture Tate Liverpool is delighted to present the first comprehensive exhibition of Gustav Klimt 's work ever staged in the UK. The exhibition focuses on the life and art of one of the world's most influential and revered artists.

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2.3 Getting to know Vienna: a virtual  tour through the city

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2.3 Getting to know Vienna: a virtual  tour through the city

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To explore a period as radical as the early 20th century in Vienna you will need eye-opening walks. These two self guided tours about Vienna 1900 below follow the likes of Sigmund Freud, Stefan Zweig, Gustav Klimt, and Otto Wagner. They are wrapped in two day itineraries, ready for your travel agenda. Plus find some great Jugendstil shopping tips below.

Vienna 1900: Designing The Viennese Style

"Nothing that is not useful can be beautiful." (Otto Wagner)

On its journey to modernism, fin-de-siècle Vienna sparked a dozen ground-breaking concepts in art, architecture, design, music, literature and the human psyche. But the Jugendstil movement's most powerful ideas was to blend these areas into one holistic artwork.

Not enough, artists such as Gustav Klimt, Kolo Moser and Josef Hoffmann committed themselves to uniting art and function. As a result the Viennese 'Jugendstil' differs from German, Scottish, French, or Belgian Art Nouveau. Just look at Gustav Klimt's frieze of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, or Otto Wagner's obsessively functional Austrian Postal Savings Bank.

Vienna 1900 Art, Architecture, Writing: Day 1

Duration of walk including museum visits: 8 to 10 hours

Vienna Secessionists And Expressionists At Museumsquartier

The Leopold Museum at Museumsquartier holds two exciting 'Vienna 1900' collections: The permanent exhibition Vienna '1900'and the world's largest Egon Schiele collection in what many call the Egon Schiele Museum.

Seeing the Vienna 1900 exhibition early on will help you align the different ways Vienna expressed itself during this era. Expect richly ornamental fabrics next to stripped-bare human portraits. Likewise, prepare for contrasts such as mystically allegoric paintings next to functionalistic furniture, glass and silverware. Or sculptures such as a life-embracing curly-haired boy in white marble next to a faceless kneeling body.

Quite obviously, Egon Schiele's portrays souls, not humans. Most have their faces and bodies bulged with anxiety and despair. While his art is raw and intense, it allows you to see the flipside of Vienna's Imperial glamour.

Gustav Klimt At Vienna Secession

Vienna 1900 is rooted in a white cubistic building a ten minutes walk from Leopold Museum. Before you follow Gustav Klimt into the basement, wander around this odd box that forms the Vienna Secession. I love the groups of owls on the outer walls, the tortoises carrying the large mosaic vases at the entrance, and not least the gigantic globe formed of hundreds of golden leaves that crowns the building.
The basement unfolds more than 30 metres of Klimt's frieze. It visualises German composer Richard Wagner's interpretation of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony: the suffering mankind encourages the well-shielded warrior to fight against the evil forces of nature. The human 'genies' (art, poetry, music) hover over them, until love fulfills mankind's desire for happiness. I find the frieze powerful because it tells a universal story of the Good, the Bad and the Ugly (even Klimt's Ugly look pretty good).

Otto Wagner At Naschmarkt

Linke Wienzeile is the place to go for Vienna 1900 architecture. The three buildings created by Art Nouveau and modernist architect Otto Wagner along Naschmarkt carry a strong lesson: 'Simplify the structure, leave space for ornamental decoration.' Baroque-style chubby cherubs, yearning madonnas and beefy atlases give way to glazed tiles, simple cascades of painted flowers, and cast iron balconies displaying neatly lined up leafage. Likewise, the female roof sculpture calling out to the market people beneath got the message: Simple shapes win.
Read more about the houses in Otto Wagner.
By the way: Naschmarkt is a great place to stop for lunch.

Klimt, Schiele And Kokoschka At National Gallery

An aesthetic eroticist, an 'enfant terrible' and a savage: The National Gallery of Belvedere Palace exposes Vienna 1900: Compare Klimt's otherworldly ladies wrapped in gold swirls and flowery ornaments with Schiele's brute females exposing their wounded souls, and with Kokoschka's intense portraits and landscapes. This place is probably the best to see two artistic perspectives of the world clash: those of the Viennese Secessionists (Gustav Klimt, Josef Maria Olbrich, Josef Hoffmann, Koloman Moser, and others) and those of the Expressionists (such as Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka).
Don't miss the Gallery's key piece: Gustav Klimt's 'The Kiss'. (Visit the Klimt Villa to see his last studio.)

Vienna 1900: Fin de siecle Vienna wasn't only architecture, but a world of thoughts. Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, and his social environment are a great way to get close to the various mindsets that dominated Vienna at that time. I toured parts of Vienna that were crucial in Freud's life (and sat on his favourite table at his favourite coffeehouse). The savvy route was put together by tour guide Gertrude. I liked the way she weaved Freud's life, family, friends and acquaintances, and favourite places into a pleasant walk. It ended with a visit to Sigmund Freud museum, Freud's former apartment and practice.
Learn more about the Sigmund Freud museum and my tour.

Stefan Zweig And Thonet At Café Central

Fin de siècle writer Stefan Zweig not only portrayed Vienna's tumultous changes at the turn of the century like no other in . He was one of the key intellectuals of Vienna 1900's vibrant coffeehouse culture. One of his favourite places was Café Central, where he wrote books and essays, and debated with contempory writers and artists such as Joseph Roth, Friedrich Torberg, Franz Kafka and others. You will also find another famous design item of that era there: the Thonet chair, that revolutionised affordable furniture for everyone and turned into a design icon of Vienna coffeehouses.
My tip: Slice an hour off your sightseeing agenda to read a novel of Stefan Zweig ('The World Of Yesterday') or Friedrich Torberg ('Tante Jolesch or the Decline of The West In Anecdotes')

Adolf Loos At Loos Bar

Vienna's most prominent and landmarked fin-de-siecle bar goes on the account of much disputed architect Adolf Loos. Responsible for a list of shockingly bare buildings such as the bank opposite the Spanish Riding School, Loos measured a tiny 30 square metre bar that he filled with four tables, a counter, and onyx and marble panelled walls. Cleverly placed mirrors widen up the ceiling area. This is a wonderful place for an design-inspired chill out, but hold off (especially on week ends) if you are claustrophobic.

Mapped Out Walk I

To zoom in just click on the map to access Google Maps.

Vienna 1900 Design and Architecture: Day 2

Duration of walk including museum visits and a concert: 7 to 8 hours

Please note that you will need a car or public transport to travel to Otto Wagner's church am Steinhof, but it's so worth it.

Austrian Postal Savings Bank

You may not have much banking to do while on a city break. But you will never feel calmer and more inspired when dealing with money (or watching others dealing) at Otto Wagner's Austrian Postal Savings Bank. At first glance, the stern building looks ordinary, until you take a closer look. This is a ground breaking piece of modernist architecture in Vienna, if not in Europe. Inside the postal savings bank, not a single iron spike is left to occasional ugliness. Learn more about Wagner's ultimate architectural statement in Austrian Postal Savings Bank.

Wiener Werkstätte At MAK

Whether you adore modernist furniture, have a hang for ornamental prints, love geometrical shapes or simply want to find out where Viennese classics end and modernist style starts: The Vienna 1900 permanent exhibition at the Museum of Applied Arts / Contemporary Art will sharpen your interest and knowledge.

What I find most fascinating there is comparing the Secessionists' flowery style to Modernist 'practical-is-king' creations. Equally, you will gain tremendous insight from tracing the Viennese style from Japanese arts and crafts and popular European art to where it starts to merge with international modernist styles.

Otto Wagner At Church Am Steinhof

If you think you know how a European church looks like, take yourself a step further. Otto Wagner's Kirche am Steinhof, the first modernist church in Europe, could be taken from an interior design magazine (if those ever covered churches).

It teaches us a lesson about great church design, about feeling welcome, reassured and spirited. The church is off the beaten path, conceptually and logistically, and definitely worth the journey. I did a guided tour through the wonderful compounds of Steinhof where the church is located. Read more in Otto Wagner church.

Vienna 1900 Music At Wiener Konzerthaus

Sink into your concert hall seat and float along with fin-de-siecle Vienna music. Like its art, Vienna 1900 music is controversial, pointing backwards and forwards in history, seducing and challenging. For example, take the sweet operetta melodies of Franz Léhar, Emmerich Kalman and Carl Michael Ziehrer that conjure Imperial traditions and values. (Go to Vienna musical and operetta calendar.)

In contrast, the likes of Gustav Mahler, Alban Berg, Arnold Schönberg and Anton Webern is deep and complex, trying to express rather than please. Search for Gustav Mahler, Alban Berg, Arnold Schönberg, Anton Webern and other composers' concert music in Vienna. (use 'artist' search box on the left in the link).

The most beautiful Vienna Art Nouveau-style concert hall is the Wiener Konzerthaus. It is very Jugendstil with its (subdued) ornamental decorations though the columns at the Grand Hall and other elements are clearly Historistic (very 'Ringstrasse'). The geometrical lampshades in the Foyer, the Tiffany windows and the decorated balcony of Mozart Saal will remind you of other modernist art in Vienna.

Mapped Out Walk II

To zoom in just click on the map to access Google Maps.

Vienna 1900 and its particular architecture expressed a powerful ideology. The expert guide who conducts this Art Nouveau walk has a reputation of immersing people into the different art movements and their political and social backgrounds. He will take into accounts your individual interests during the walk, if you want to visit a museum, walk into a building or down a particular street. Find out more about this guided Vienna Art Nouveau walk. (photo: Vienna Secession's 'cabbage head')

Jugendstil Shopping Tips

Go beyond the Klimt mousepad and reward yourself with originals or authentic remakes of the best Vienna 1900 designs. Here are a few of the best objects to buy and where to find them in Vienna (the Vienna Shopping Guide has all the addresses).

bar set of glasses designed by Adolf Loos; from traditional glass manufacturer J.L. Lobmeyr (Kaerntner Strasse);

Melon porcelain mocca service designed by Josef Hoffmann; from Augarten porcelain manufactory and MAK Design Shop;

Ver Sacrum bags, wallets and scarves, based on a fabric design by Hoffmann (see photo); from Vienna 1900 store;

glass vases based on designs by Josef Hoffmann; from Österreichische Werkstaetten;

silver tableware based on designs by Hoffmann; from Wiener Silbermanufaktur and MAK Design Shop;

20th century decorative art such as paintings, drawings, glass and silverware; from Dorotheum auction house (over the counter);

Jugendstil paintings, drawings, arts and crafts, vintage jewellery; occasional auctions at Dorotheum auction house.

explore other Vienna Walks
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Vienna 1900: Two Eye Opening Walks In Wien - Vienna Unwrapped

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To explore a period as radical as the early 20th century in Vienna you will need eye-opening walks. These two self guided tours about Vienna 1900 below follow the likes of Sigmund Freud, Stefan Zweig, Gustav Klimt, and Otto Wagner. They are wrapped in two day itineraries, ready for your travel agenda.

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2.4 Who were the characters that make up Viennese modernism?

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2.4 Who were the characters that make up Viennese modernism?

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The unifying power of art: anarticle

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Vienna in Austria is a wonderfully accessible city, with art infusing every aspect of its society.

Strolling its myriad of city streets you come quite unexpectedly across buildings that are like a mini snapshot of a time when, with an act of youthful idealism, a spirit of sacrifice and a willingness to work hard, a group of youthful artists and artisans plunged Vienna into the age of modernity.

They were led by painter Gustav Klimt (1862 - 1918), whose brilliant individualism would dominate the era. At Vienna in 2012 they are celebrating the life and times of Gustav Klimt, whose painting genius is today recognised as having been integral to the birth of modernism in Europe in the late nineteenth century.

The Belvedere Palace and Museum in Vienna owns the world's largest collection of paintings by Gustav Klimt, including his world-famous painting "The Kiss".
'To every age its art, to art its freedom'*
It was in 1897 that Gustav Klimt decided to lead a group of primarily young Viennese artists, painters, sculptors and architects as they seceded from the prestigious Kunsterhaus (Artists House) to set up a Society of Austrian Artists - the Vienna Secession.

They staged their first exhibition in March 1898. Their aims were purely aesthetic and founded in coffeehouse culture.

The decorative arts magazine The Studio, which was devoured in all the capital's most stylish cafes as well as their own magazine Ver Sacrum, which featured the highly decorative works of the period, inspired their work.

While tradition is all-pervasive in Vienna, so is the air of promise.

Dressed with a great sense of style its citizens busily embrace change, while celebrating the integration of art in every day life and their continuing love of café society.

Visiting its many museums and galleries, listening to Strauss waltzes in the park and eating Sacher Torte are activities most tourists embrace at some time. However it is the hidden Vienna, where you can suddenly come across buildings in the Jugendstil (Young Style), with their combination of straight geometry and carefully controlled organic curves, that is very exciting.

There are also the stunning decorative and fine artworks of the Vienna Secessionists, who in their day went against the status quo.

The Secession Building is today affectionately known as "the cabbage head' because of the big ball of gilded laurel leaves that surmounts the structure, snugly fitting into what has now become an architectural icon.

It was designed for the young idealists by Joseph Maria Olbrich (1867 - 1908) during what was a brief life and brilliant career.

He left this elegant city with this simply splendid structure, which he called 'a cathedral for art'.

Olbrich was apprenticed to another architectural and urban planning genius of the time Otto Wagner (1841- 1918), whose career had a lasting impact on Vienna, transforming its appearance and infrastructures. Architect Josef Hoffman made up a trio of fine visionaries.

In 1905-11 he designed the Palais Stoclet in Brussels for Belgian industrialist Alfred Stoclet. This was a Villa built for a private financier who ' wanted a large house, he loved the arts and gave us an entirely free hand' Hoffman noted.

The Villa Stoclet has since been described as a universal, complete, flawless masterpiece of a thousand years of architectural history.

At the Villa Stoclet the Dining Room contained murals by Gustav Klimt and furniture by Hoffman.

Harmony governed every facet of this total work of art and it became the extreme statement of Viennese avant-garde design.

It was ambitious, an accomplished achievement of the Wiener Werkstatte, (Vienna Workshops) also founded by Hoffman in 1903.

A strange astonishing edifice it might have come from another planet, it was in fact transposed far from the city of its conception to a setting, which is still alien to it.

It exemplified in embryo the major features of the coming Art Deco movement of which it was one of the great founding monuments.

As a way of contrast the stunning Belvedere palaces in Vienna with their extensive gardens are also amazing landmarks.

The two magnificent palaces, the Upper and Lower Belvedere were built during the 18th century at Vienna as the summer residence of general Prince Eugene of Savoy (1663-1736).

He chose architect Johann Lucas von Hildebrandt (1668-1745) to complete the work in what we now know as the classic Baroque style. They are important buildings on the landscape of modern Vienna.

Great events in the cities history have taken place in the Upper Belvedere's Marble Hall, which has a spectacular view of this truly wonderful city.

The Prince Eugene of Savoy engaged in successful military and diplomatic activities during the reign of three Hapsburg emperors of Austria. They also allowed him to become a great patron of the arts, which he was passionate about.

All of this was far removed from his role as military commanders in Austria, especially as he had been born a Frenchman and was often called on to fight his own countrymen.

Times were different and perhaps The Belvedere website explains it the best when it notes that ' one can observe him (the Prince of Savoy) as an innovative and successful manager who was aware of the positive and unifying power of art and culture'.

Following Napoleon's rout of Europe and his exile to the island of St Helena a meeting of the victorious allied powers Austria, Prussia, Russia, Britain and France took place at the Congress of Vienna to establish a new order in Europe.

The aim was to provide a foundation for peace, which continued more or less, with minor interruptions until 1914. As a result, a sense of hope was reborn among the mercantile class in Germany and Austria and the growth of the bourgeoisie created a demand for housing, furniture and decorative items.

Vienna, struggling to leave behind the conservatism of the past, eagerly embraced contemporary ideas and change under the influence and leadership of its artists, intellectuals and scientists.

They were helping to imagine a very different future one where art and industry could come together.

From 1865 the Emperor Franz-Joseph I, who had ascended to power in a period of political turmoil, commenced a campaign of modernisation that saw the city's medieval ramparts levelled and the great encircling triumph the Ringstrasse carved out.

Not unlike the modernisation in Paris under Haussmann that had commended in 1853, which saw the creation of wide boulevards, the Austrian Emperor's campaign recast Vienna in the light of a formative modernity of electricity, efficiency and function, while providing a new stage for an emerging haute-bourgeoisie to display their bourgeoning wealth and influence.

Vienna was at the time a world centre of power, science and culture.

Born near Vienna Gustav Klimt was the second of seven children. Awarded a scholarship in 1876 to attend the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts (Kunstgewerbeschule).

He was there until 1883 and was part of a team of students who helped their teacher paint murals on the staircase wall in the Kunsthistorisches Museum at Vienna. He commenced his own career painting murals on walls and ceilings on commission.

In 1888 he received a Golden Order of Merit from the Emperor, Franz Josef for his work at the Burgtheater.

His closest brother Ernst and his father both died in the same year, 1892. This was a setback both for Klimt's artistry and future as he became responsible for his brother's children, his siblings, let alone the 14 children he fathered during his lifetime.

Interestingly Klimt did not indulge in café society or mix with other artists socially, only professionally. As a committed champion of the modern movement at Vienna, he was the first president of the Vienna Secession, dedicating himself and his work to help furthering the avant-garde.

Klimt painted (as a temporary work with no intent for long term conservation) the much copied and simply splendid 'Beethoven Frieze' in the Vienna Secession building.

Perhaps more than any other artist of his period he traversed the old and the new patronage structures very well. He enjoyed Imperial favour while growing independently wealthy from the commissions of a taste-setting elite in the upper strata of bourgeoisie Viennese Society.

Vienna's art world at the time accepted the vision and work of English designers such as Arts and Crafts guru William Morris and Scottish designer Charles Rennie Macintosh in their fight to combat goods produced by the Industrial Revolution.

Mackintosh trained in the tradition of the English Arts and Crafts movement, cultivating a rigorous formal economy of design that especially appealed to the members of the Viennese Secession.

In 1900, Secession leaders Otto Wagner, Josef Hoffman and Josef Maria Olbrich invited Mackintosh to exhibit with them at the 8th Vienna Secession exhibition and they received much critical acclaim.

On 14 June 1905 Gustav Klimt and other artists left the Vienna Secession due to differences of opinion over artistic concepts.

Quietly eccentric in advancing years, Klimt experienced great success, despite having so many people dependent on his achievements. As his fame grew he could choose to be selective in accepting commissions.

His 'golden phase' when he used a great deal of gold leaf in his work (c1898 - 1908) was clearly affected by his travels to Ravenna, where he encountered Roman mosaics and the splendour of the 'golden' interior of St Mark's cathedral at Venice.

The Kiss, and possibly his most famous work, his portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer** comes from this period.

In Klimt, a work by Frank Whitford, Gustav Klimt is accredited with saying
'I am a painter who paints day after day from morning to night...Who ever wants to know something about me... ought to look carefully at my pictures'.
At the World Exhibitions held at Rome in 1911 Klimt received first prize for his painting Death and Life. He died at Vienna in 1918 leaving some of his works unfinished.

His paintings have since brought some of the highest prices ever received, his portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II gaining the third highest price paid ever for a work of art at auction selling in 2006 for $88,000,000.00

Vienna, and the world at large celebrated the life and art works of one of Austria's favourite sons Gustav Klimt in 2012.

Over the course of 150 years since his birth Gustav Klimt has become a phenomenon in terms of the evolution of art and science, as well as the history of the world.

Carolyn McDowall, The Culture Concept Circle, 2012-2014

* Above the entrance to the Secession Building was placed the phrase "Der Zeit ihre Kunst. Der Kunst ihre Freiheit" ("To every age its art. To art its freedom.")

** The paintings initially belonged to the Bloch-Bauer couple. It was confiscated by the Nazis, and bought by the Moderne Gallerie (now Österreichische Galerie), Vienna in 1941. In 2006, a court decision attributed the ownership of the painting to Maria Altmann, the niece of the Bloch-Bauers. She sold the painting for 135 million dollars to Ronald Lauder, who then transferred it to the Neue Gallery in New York City.
Website: Vienna

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Gustav Klimt - The Unifying Power of Art & Culture @ Vienna

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Vienna in Austria is a wonderfully accessible city, with art infusing every aspect of its society. Strolling its myriad of city streets you come quite unexpectedly across buildings that are like a mini snapshot of a time when, with an act of youthful idealism, a spirit of sacrifice and a willingness to work hard, a group of youthful artists and artisans plunged Vienna into the age of modernity.

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Cafe Griensteidl-meeting place of intellectuals, painters and thinkers-article in German

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Wien um 1900, das war auch die Blütezeit der Wiener Kaffeehäuser. Sie wurden fast ausschließlich von Männern besucht - Frauen durften nur in Begleitung hinein - und dienten oft dem Spiel und der Unterhaltung. Wer einen Kaffee bestellen wollte, suchte ihn sich nach der Farbe aus, denn die verschiedenen Kaffeevariationen hatten noch keinen Namen. Friedrich Torberg berichtet, dass ein Kellner des Café Herrenhof immer eine Farbskala mit zwanzig nummerierten Brauntönen mit sich trug, um die gewünschte Farbtönung servieren zu können.

Die Geschichte des Wiener Kaffeehauses beginnt schon sehr viel früher. Als es 1683 dem kaiserlichen Heer gelang, die Belagerung Wiens aufzuheben und die Türken in die Flucht zu schlagen, fielen den Siegern etliche Säcke mit Kaffee in die Hände. Zwei Jahre später, so belegen Dokumente, wurde das erste Kaffeehaus gegründet, 1700 waren es bereits vier. In diesem Jahr erhielten sie von Kaiser Leopold I. das exklusive Recht, Kaffee in Wien auszuschenken. Von Jahr zu Jahr kamen neue Kaffeehäuser dazu, 1819 zählte man bereits 150 Kaffeesieder.
Das Café Griensteidl
1847 wurde dann das Café Griensteidl gegründet, das sich schnell zum Treffpunkt für Politiker entwickelte und sich für kurze Zeit National-Café nannte. Jahre später trafen sich dort die freisinnigen Kräfte Wiens, während die gemäßigten und konservativen Kreise eher im Café Daum verkehrten, berichtete Sigmund Wilhelm 1912 (in: Hans Weigel, Das Wiener Kaffeehaus, Wien 1978).

Bekannt wurde das von Heinrich Griensteidl gegründete Café aber vor allem als Treffpunkt der Schriftsteller des „Jung-Wien". Kopf dieser Gruppe war Hermann Bahr, der von 1894 bis 1904 die Wochenzeitschrift Die Zeit herausgab. Die „Kaffehausliteraten", zu denen unter anderem Arthur Schnitzler, Richard Beer-Hofmann und Hugo von Hofmannsthal gehörten, lehnten den Naturalismus ab und bereiteten den Weg für eine literarische Moderne, mit der Hermann Bahr sich von der Gründerzeit und dem Historismus abheben wollte, wie Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler in „Literatur - zwischen Dekadenz und Moderne" (in: Traum und Wirklichkeit - Wien 1870-1930, Wien 1985) schreibt. Für Schmidt-Dengler stellt das Jahr 1890 eine „wichtige Zäsur in der österreichischen Literaturgeschichte" dar, nach der neue Leitbilder verbindlich wurden, wie er weiter schreibt (S. 304).

Aber die Gruppe „Jung-Wien" musste auch viel Kritik einstecken, vor allem von Karl Kraus, der in seinem 1897 veröffentlichten Pamphlet Die demolirte Litteratur die Kaffeehausliteraten heftig kritisierte. Dabei habe es sich nicht um eine mehr oder weniger belanglose Literatenfehde gehandelt, schreibt Schmidt-Dengler in seinem Aufsatz und fährt fort: „Seine Kritik ist von Anfang an vom Kampf gegen den Missbrauch der Sprache her organisiert. Kraus erblickte in der Sprache die einzige untrügliche Instanz; Sprachmoral wurde mit Moral gleichgesetzt, und die Entlarvung des Sprachmissbrauchs ist zugleich Entlarvung der Missetat. (S. 306).

Mit dem Titel der demolierten Literatur knüpfte Kraus an eine ein Jahr zuvor gemachte Äußerung an: „Wien wird jetzt zur Großstadt demolirt. Mit den alten Häusern fallen die letzten Pfeiler unserer Erinnerungen und bald wird ein respektloser Spaten auch das ehrwürdige Café Griensteidl dem Boden gleichgemacht haben" (zitiert aus: Hans Weigel, Das Wiener Kaffeehaus, Wien 1978, S. 62). 1897 kam dann das Ende. Im Zuge der Umbauarbeiten am Michaelerplatz wurde das Haus abgerissen, erst seit 1990 gibt es an diesem Ort wieder ein Café Griensteidl.

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Das Café Griensteidl als Treffpunkt der Schriftsteller des „Jung Wien" - MAKblog

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Wien um 1900, das war auch die Blütezeit der Wiener Kaffeehäuser. Sie wurden fast ausschließlich von Männern besucht - Frauen durften nur in Begleitung hinein - und dienten oft dem Spiel und der Unterhaltung. Wer einen Kaffee bestellen wollte, suchte ihn sich nach der Farbe aus, denn die verschiedenen Kaffeevariationen hatten noch keinen Namen.

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Victoria Charles and Carl Klaus

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Victoria Charles and  Carl Klaus

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2.6 Pleasure and Enjoyment in 1900 Vienna

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2.6 Pleasure and Enjoyment in 1900 Vienna

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City of Dreams (Vienna 1900-1935): Social Changes in 20th Century Vienna

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Wer war er? (AUF DEUTSCH)

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About his masterpiece "The Tempest."

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1/2 Masterpieces of Vienna - The Tempest : Kokoschka

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Muse and mistress AND ARTIST

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When Alma Mahler walked into a room, heads turned. Her magnetic presence and charismatic allure were like "an electric charge" in any gathering. She was a femme fatale who commanded fascination, adoration, and love and could enchant people in seconds. At the age of nineteen, with clear skin, an enigmatic smile, lustrous, flowing hair, and piercing, watchful blue eyes, Alma was called "the most beautiful girl in Vienna." Her personality was mercurial; one minute she was the grande dame-imposing, regal, exuding authority-the next she was jolly and good humored, revealing "the Viennese soft femininity [which] even in her most awful moments, made it difficult to really dislike her." Some likened her to a demigoddess to whom her admirers and devotees brought gifts. Others loathed her.

Alma was a modern woman who lived out of her time. With an independent will, an intelligent mind of her own, and a strong sense of her own worth, she harbored ambitions that were completely at odds with the behavior expected of young women in late nineteenth-century Viennese society. Her freedom mattered as she challenged the constraints imposed on her.

Alma was deeply romantic. She needed to be loved fiercely and also to feel love with a passion that fired her being. Only superior creative talents inspired her love. She was irresistibly and erotically attracted to a series of extraordinary men of glittering talent and genius, each of whom would make his distinctive mark on the European cultural landscape.

Her first infatuation was with the painter Gustav Klimt, though he never made a golden portrait of her and did not become her lover. Composer Gustav Mahler was her first husband, and, after he died in 1911, the wild expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka openly became her lover. Her second husband, the architect Walter Gropius (with whom she had had an affair while married to Mahler), founded the modernist Bauhaus movement; her third was the then widely read novelist and poet Franz Werfel. Several other writers, composers, and artists who worshiped her praised her for her "unique gift," her "profound, uncanny understanding of what creative men tried to achieve, and her capacity to persuade them that they could do what they aimed at, and that she, Alma, understood what it was," as one associate described it.

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Alma had not anticipated this. At eighteen, music was her passion. Her consuming aspiration was to be a composer, an extremely ambitious goal for a young woman. Nothing moved her as much as her usual twice-weekly visits to the opera, which left her enraptured and her imagination overwhelmed by its beauty and grandeur. But women composers were almost nonexistent. Girls were taught the piano not to encourage their creativity but to burnish their accomplishments as elegant and cultured wives. Women were still barred from studying at the music and art academies. Their capacity for creativity was deemed, then and later, to be limited, parochial, "domestic," and their creative vision, by their very nature, far inferior to that of men. If, as happened to Alma, a work revealed remarkable talent, its merits were belittled or attributed to the influence or direct intervention of another-male-composer.

The adverse climate did not dim Alma's ambition. For she was compelled to create music, driven by the spirit that flows from mysterious sources. Her belief in her innately superior pedigree, descended as she was from a painter father, Emil Jakob Schindler, whom she was convinced was a genius, gave her an unshakeable confidence in her own worth. From him came her profound conviction that the pursuit of artistic excellence was the only truly worthwhile goal and that only a person of exceptional creative talent was worthy of eliciting her love or capturing her soul.
If, as happened to Alma, a woman's musical work revealed remarkable talent, its merits were belittled or attributed to the influence or direct intervention of another-male-composer.
But, when she was twenty-one, Alma was faced with a dreadful dilemma. She had to choose between her passion for a genius nearly twice her age, Gustav Mahler, and the pursuit of her own precious goal, her music. She chose the genius. Why? She had become persuaded of the nobility of giving herself entirely to a superior being who would "give my life meaning," she explained. It was a capitulation of her inner being to the prevailing view of the role of the wife, and it happened, despite her stubborn nature and her modern ideas, because of the overwhelming intensity of her love.

Although the loss of her own music left a lasting wound, music would remain her source of strength during a life of passion and high drama, shadowed by tragedy with the premature loss of her first husband and the deaths of three of her four children. Love was the core of her existence and the wellspring of the power that this restless and irrepressible woman would from then on exercise over those in her orbit.

Born in 1879, Alma Schindler was brought up as a child in the bohemian artistic circles to which her parents, Emil and Anna Schindler, belonged, and, as an adolescent at the busy hub of the influential Viennese avant-garde, the Secession movement cofounded by her stepfather, the artist Carl Moll. She was a young woman of exceptional vitality and intellectual curiosity, eager and open, like a flower to the sun, to life and new experience.

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The milieu of her self-discovery was fin-de-siècle Vienna, the magnet for talent and enterprise from across the sprawling Austro-Hungarian (or Habsburg) empire and the crucible for innovation and new ideas in every sphere of culture and intellectual thought. Artists, composers, writers, dramatists, architects, and scientists of the psyche all sought to express the new soul and spirit of modern man and woman, their condition of uncertainty and nervous anxiety, their rejection of ossified principles, and their search for inner truth through emotional and psychological introspection. In so doing they shaped the intellectual currents that defined the twentieth century.

Yet underlying the city's buoyant cultural energy was an ominous sense of unease. The multinational empire of Austria-Hungary, which for three centuries had held together a kaleidoscope of nationalities and ethnic minorities covering much of central Europe, had begun to fragment. Demands by minorities for greater autonomy and increased rights to control their own languages and territory were opening up fissures that threatened the empire's cohesion and stability. Faced with these intractable problems, the Viennese zeitgeist turned increasingly toward the unifying and exuberant balms of art and culture, in which pursuit the city could still lay claim to be the capital of Europe.

Within this atmosphere of cultural ferment, the guide, mentor, and polestar of the young Alma's existence was her father, the painter Emil Jakob Schindler. She would spend many hours in his studio, watching him paint, "standing and staring at the revelations of the hand that led the brush," and through this she acquired an intuitive sense of the process and struggle of artistic creation. Such intense involvement with the artist she loved unreservedly nurtured in her young imagination fantasies of patronage: "I dreamed of wealth merely in order to smooth the paths of creative personalities. I wished for a great Italian garden filled by many white studios; I wished to invite many outstanding men there-to live for their art alone, without mundane worries-and never to show myself," she wrote.

Alma's love of music dated back to her childhood when her "profoundly musical" father sang beautifully his favorite Schumann lieder and her mother, Anna, a trained singer, joined in. Emil Schindler took his intelligent, growing daughter seriously. His conversation was "fascinating and never commonplace," she recalled. When she was eight, he led Alma and her sister, Gretl, into his studio to tell them the story of Goethe's Faust: "We wept, not knowing why. When we were all enraptured, he gave us the book. 'This is the most beautiful book in the world,' he said. 'Read it. Keep it.'" Her furious mother thought it unsuitable reading for small children and removed it. As her parents argued, Alma and Gretl listened behind closed doors with bated breath. Their mother won: "But in my mind a fixed idea remained: I had to get the Faust back!" Alma wrote.

Her unwavering devotion to Goethe spawned a burgeoning interest in literature and, later, philosophy. But her education was otherwise patchy. Though Alma appears to have attended school for a short period, she and Gretl, in common with other bourgeois Viennese girls, were taught at home by tutors. Alma's tutors were either "nasty" and were dismissed, or they were nice and taught them nothing. Girls had been admitted to secondary school in Vienna since 1868, but until 1892, when Alma was thirteen, they were still barred from the gymnasium- the grammar school-and access to universities was still impossible. The education of girls, including Alma, tended to focus on social skills-French, dress making, and piano, rather than the philosophy and literature that inspired her.

Alma remembered herself as "a nervous child, fairly bright, with the typical hop-skip-and jump brains of precocity I could not think anything through, and was never able to keep a date in mind, and took no interest in anything but music." Later she railed loudly against this neglect of girls' education: "Why are boys taught to use their brains, but not girls? I can see it in my own case. My mind has not been schooled, which is why I have such frightful difficulty with everything. Sometimes I really try, force myself to think, but my thoughts vanish into thin air. And I really want to use my mind. I really do. Why do they make everything so terribly difficult for girls?"
taught to use their brains, but not girls?"
However, she had acquired through her father a deep appreciation of painting and of the arts. Schindler, though influenced by plein air painters like Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Théodore Rousseau, and Charles-François Daubigny, had developed his own vision of landscape known as poetic realism-atmospheric paintings saturated with feeling, which convey a strong sense of transience in images that are both aesthetic and subjective. He focused not on the heroic panorama of landscape but on the mundane and everyday-the vegetable garden, the mill and stream near their house, the poplar tree avenue-which he transformed with fluent brushstrokes in different light and atmospheric conditions into statements of poetic truth. Although rooted in the Viennese tradition, his style reflected the new understanding of nature that was spreading across Europe. In Alma's eyes, he was the true prophet of the Austrian landscape.

In complete contrast, Alma's expansive imagination was also fired by the opulent spectacles of her father's friend and associate, Hans Makart, the most fashionable artist of the era. His dramatic, ornate representations of allegorical, historical, and classical motifs decorated Vienna's public buildings and private neo-Renaissance palaces, and he was the dominant influence on painting, fashion, and interior design: Makart hats and Makart red were all the rage, along with the Makart bouquets-bunches of dried flowers, ostrich feathers, and grasses that decorated the salons of the bourgeoisie.

Alma fell under Makart's spell for a time: "I loved trailing velvet gowns, and I wanted to be rowed in gondolas with velvet draperies floating astern," she wrote. She was entranced by stories of his legendary parties, when "the loveliest women were dressed in genuine Renaissance costumes, rose garlands trailed from ballroom ceilings, Franz Liszt played through the nights, the choicest wines flowed, velvet-clad pages stood behind every chair, and so forth to the limits of splendor and imagination."

Alongside this romantic extravagance there was in Alma a practical young woman with a sense of the difficulties and hardships of life. For her family's comparatively comfortable existence had been only recently earned.

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Excerpted from Passionate Spirit: The Life of Alma Mahler by Cate Haste. ©Cate Haste 2019. Reprinted with permission from Basic Books.

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On Alma Mahler, Muse and Mistress of Fin-de-Siecle Vienna

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When Alma Mahler walked into a room, heads turned. Her magnetic presence and charismatic allure were like "an electric charge" in any gathering. She was a femme fatale who commanded fascination, adoration, and love and could enchant people in seconds.

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Frederic Morton was from Vienna—his family was exiled, and he didn’t become a writer until later in life—and this is the most respected academic account of turn of the century Vienna, which is both very dense and full of dish. He gathered up all the different threads of amazing personalities like Klimt, Freud, and the crown prince, whose suicide pact with his 17-year-old mistress inspired the film Mayerling with Omar Sharif, and put them all together in one very valuable book.”

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The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind and  Brain
Eric R. Kandel

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The Making of a Psyschoanalyst
Adam Phillips

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Edmund de Waal

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Egon Schiele:                        Death and the Maiden

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Egon Schiele:                        Death and the Maiden

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Film in German (English subtitles)

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Film in English
Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (also called The Lady in Gold or The Woman in Gold) is a painting by Gustav Klimt, completed between 1903 and 1907. The portrait was commissioned by the sitter's husband, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, a Jewish banker and sugar producer.

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A student of Sigmund Freud and an Austrian detective team up to solve some of the most mysterious and deadly cases in early 1900s Vienna.

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Watch "Before Sunrise." Why? ... just because it is brilliant and set in Vienna

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Watch "Before Sunrise." Why? ... just because it is brilliant and set in Vienna

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Half-Truths and One-and-a-Half-Truths: Selected Aphorisms of Karl Kraus

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In Fin de Siècle Vienna, politics had become the least convincing of the performing arts. Life, Kraus wrote, had become an effort that deserved a better cause. By the turn of the century, it was not politicians but actors, painters, writers and musicians who had captured the imagination of the upper-middle classes. As the Hapsburg Empire disintegrated, it seemed to Kraus that life in Vienna was no longer imitating art: it was parodying it. And for Kraus it was the 'mental self-mutilation of mankind through its press' that had done most to trivialise and misrepresent what was becoming a terrifying political situation. Kraus exposed, often by imitation, the new decadent facetiousness. Journalists, he wrote, were now capable of 'launching a premiere one day and a war the next'. They 'write because they have nothing to say, and have something to say because they write'. Editing and writing most of his own newspaper Die Fackel (the Torch) in Vienna from 1899 to 1936, he believed that the collapse of the Empire and the drift to world war could only be accurately documented as satire. Only the satirist was honestly suspicious. All forms of representation, advertisements, the wearing of beards, the way people strolled in the streets, had to be understood in terms of what it was they were being used to misrepresent. Events, and the reporting of events, had to be interpreted now as artistic genres concealing vested interests. In May 1916, in the middle of the war, it was still not clear to Kraus what play of Shakespeare's was actually being performed. By October 1918 he was clear that it was Hamlet.

A certain vigilance was required, Kraus began to realise, to deal with the 'masquerade' of modern life. The unprecedented number of competing ideological claims, the sheer volume of other people's words that the new mass-media made available, was turning character into a kind of cultural ventriloquism. People suffered from other people's ideas and never recovered themselves. The individual was becoming merely a repertoire of identifiable voices, a collage of new vocabularies. 'In these times,' Kraus wrote, 'you should not expect from me any words of my own.' It was an age of unavoidable quotation, and the newspapers, in Kraus's view, were playing on the prevailing air of unreality. The gradual breakdown of political consensus had estranged people from the old sense of a shared world, and in its place a new one was being fabricated by a press committed only to the business interests it served. Language had to be redeemed from its new status as a commodity depreciated, but for Kraus never inspired, by mass consumption. 'Contemporaries,' he wrote, 'live from second-hand to mouth.' His passionate denunciation of social injustice was accompanied by a pious fantasy of purity, of a language being violated.

It was Walter Benjamin, in 1931, who wrote what is in many ways still the most revealing essay on Kraus and his 'struggle against the empty phrase, which is the linguistic expression of the despotism with which, in journalism, topicality sets up its dominion over things'. The muted violence of the empty phrase could only be countered by the shrewdest form of ridicule, a contempt close to the heart. His aphorisms turned empty phrases inside out. The goat-like satyr on the front cover of Die Fackel suggests, as Edward Timms says, 'that for the Kraus of the 1890s satire was a vaguely defined primitive force disrupting the civilities of a philistine society.' But as the political situation worsened, Kraus embarked on the graver, more apocalyptic project of seeing the signs of the end of the world.

'The satirist,' Benjamin suggested in his essay, 'is the figure in whom the cannibal was received into civilisation.' Because satire is so overtly reactive to circumstance, and because of the satirist's complicity with his victims, academic research can be useful, as Timms's book is, in explaining the occasion for what Benjamin calls the 'devouring of the object'. Kraus was not, as both Benjamin and Timms make clear, an indiscriminate consumer, but his work was seriously compromised by the confusion of divided loyalties. Despite the fact that, as Timms writes, 'the greatest enterprise of his career' was 'his satirical campaign against the inhumanity of war', there was 'an unresolved tension between Kraus's growing opposition to the war and his continuing respect for the army'. All satirists run the risk of being paralysed by their own self-contempt. Admirers of Kraus have had to accommodate a number of these 'unresolved tensions': a loathing of racism alongside an occasionally virulent (Jewish) anti-semitism; a commitment to women's political rights which was not incompatible with embittered misogynistic attitudes. These things, one might say, merely make Kraus a representative figure: but there is something elusive about him which has to do with the fact that while the targets of his contempt have always been clear, the nature of his allegiances has not - except in the case of his often acclaimed allegiance to language itself. 'My language,' he wrote as the ironic proprietor, 'is the common prostitute that I turn into a virgin' (for Kraus the question was always: what kind of woman is the German language, and what kind of relationship will she allow him to have with her). 'I only master the language of others, my own does with me as it pleases,' he wrote, describing his favourite version of the romantic triangle. But the romance too easily lent itself to what Benjamin described as 'the strange interplay between reactionary theory and revolutionary practice that is found everywhere in Kraus', and which has become a familiar contradiction in cultural criticism. The few commentators in English on Kraus have tended to simplify him by a curious sort of idealisation, suggesting either that he was a man of consistent positions, many of which were astonishingly prophetic of events - 'Progress makes purses out of human skin' - or that his self-elected role as guardian of the German language, the mother tongue, exempted him in some mysterious way, as he himself sometimes claimed, from taking sides. What they don't see is that his particular brand of satire was to show how the use of a language was always a form of investment. In what amounts to a series of linked essays in his immensely informative book, Edward Timms has restored Kraus's contradictions, though not always with the gusto of his subject. From the different intellectual and biographical perspectives that Timms provides, Kraus becomes a more puzzling kind of prophet.

Kraus was born in 1874 in northern Bohemia, the youngest son of a Jewish paper manufacturer who would eventually finance his son's newspaper. The family moved when he was three to Vienna, the city which he despised and to which he was deeply attached, and which was to become within twenty years the most spectacular setting for what Timms calls Kraus's 'passionate parochialism'. 'The streets of Vienna,' he would write, 'are paved with culture, the streets of other cities with asphalt.' In the work of his contemporaries, the poetry of Hofmannsthal, the plays of Schnitzler, the paintings of Klimt, the writings of Freud and Wittgenstein, the links between new, recondite kinds of private experience and the public world were being radically re-described. In a period of political disintegration and extraordinary cultural production, Kraus served his apprenticeship as a journalist in the thriving literary coffee-houses of the 1890s. Timms gives a compelling account of the way Die Fackel was made possible by an audience, at least in retrospect, unwittingly prepared for it. So enthusiastic was this audience that the first number sold thirty thousand copies. By 1900, Vienna was one of the great artistic capitals of the world, and the sophisticated city culture created by the emergence of a prosperous bourgeoisie was unusually receptive to Kraus's ridicule. 'I and my public understand each other very well,' he noted: 'it does not hear what I say, and I don't say what it wants to hear.' This was the kind of profitable misunderstanding that for Kraus characterised the beglamoured crisis of everyday life in Vienna, in which people learnt from the theatre 'how to be Viennese'. The city itself was like a stage set, the facade, Timms writes, 'moulded and embellished according to the principle that opulent appearance was more important than functional design'. The architecture of the city, like much else, revealed 'the triumph of facade over function'. In an interesting chapter on Kraus's relationship with the architect Adolf Loos, Timms shows how Kraus began to incorporate 'the motifs of ornament and facade into his satire'. 'In Austria,' Kraus wrote, 'the painters are being overshadowed by the decorators, just as the writers are being swallowed by the journalists.' Cultural pastiche was being used to mask social contradictions. As the dynastic centralism of the old Empire gave way to various multinational claims, political instability was being concealed by ostentatious display. What Timms refers to as 'the ideological saturation of everyday life', Kraus saw as a 'masquerade' brash with contradictions. The cover of the most influential Viennese newspaper, the Neue Freie Presse, published earnestly instructive articles about the sanctity of family life while the back cover of the newspaper ran advertisements for 'Miss Birch, Box No 69'. There were so many prostitutes on the streets that it was more difficult to avoid them than to find them, the novelist Stefan Zweig recalled.

Kraus's newspaper was revolutionary because Austria had no tradition of independent critical journalism. Austrian newspapers represented government policies and the vested interests of their owners, most of whom had links with the large banks and finance corporations. It was routine practice, for example, to disguise advertisements as news articles. August Zang, the founder of Die Presse, was quoted as saying that ideally he would like 'a newspaper that did not contain a single line that had not been paid for'. Maximilien Harden, the editor of Die Zukunft in Berlin, had managed to maintain his independence only by owning the newspaper he edited. Inspired by the example of Harden, Kraus got his father to back the first issue of Die Fackel. Its extraordinary success made it self-financing, though Kraus's independence was in any case to be guaranteed by the private income he inherited after his father's death in 1900. But the uniqueness of his position misled him into believing that he had invented himself, that he could be, as he said, 'a writer without preconceptions who observes things without party spectacles'. He thought that to be aligned in any way was to be contaminated. As part of his 'draining of the vast swamp of slogans and clichés' he used Die Fackel at first to attack all ideological affiliations: socialism, capitalism, anti-semitism, Zionism, Pan-Germanism, Pan-Slavism, liberalism.

He satirised the idea of militant conviction. 'His reformist campaign,' Timms comments, 'could only be implemented with political support. But his intransigence towards organised factions effectively precluded it.' His reformism was too broadly based to lead to recognisable policies, and this was surely connected with what Timms calls 'the tension between vigorous polemical commitment and self-absorbed verbal artistry' in his writing. 'Let language be the divining rod that finds sources of thought,' he wrote: but he believed he could then exempt himself from ideological commitment through his obligation to language. In this way, his early, and often brilliant, fanatical unmasking of others turned into diffuse self-justification, perhaps in an unconscious attempt to find a position beyond criticism in a language without history. 'It is deeply rooted in Kraus's nature,' Benjamin wrote, 'and it is the stigma of every debate concerning him, that all apologetic arguments miss their mark.' Kraus was only ever fickle by necessity, not by conviction, and this may be bound up with what Timms calls, in one of his chapter titles, 'the dilemma of the baptised Jew'. Born a Jew, Kraus finally renounced his Judaism in 1899. In 1911, he converted to Catholicism, which he renounced in 1923. A committed journalist who condemned journalism, he was also, as Timms says, 'a Jew by birth, an Austrian by nationality, a Viennese by residence, a German by language, a journalist by profession, bourgeois by social status and a rentier by economic position. Amid the ideological turmoil of Austria-Hungary, all of these ascribed identities seemed like falsifications.' Or the idea of coherent identity had itself become meaningless for the increasing number of people who had never settled. It may have been Kraus's nature to assume, often unwittingly, impossibly self-contradictory positions out of fear of being misrecognised, even by himself. 'I don't like to meddle,' he wrote, 'in my private affairs.'

By the same token, Kraus was a great critic of psychoanalysis, who saw that it was pernicious only in so far as it seemed to be conclusive and who understood its crucial paradox: that its method was inspired, but its stated aims were not. 'One of the most widespread diseases,' he wrote, 'is diagnosis.' In one of the most interesting chapters in his book, Timms gives a persuasive account of Freud and Kraus as 'essentially complementary'. It was Freud's followers, rather than Freud himself, that Kraus was wary of. Freud had described an unconscious of ferocious inventiveness yet psychoanalysts seemed to have an ominous anxiety about loose ends. The discoveries of psychoanalysis, Kraus believed, were being used by Freud's followers in a pre-emptive strike against the imagination. Psychoanalysis seemed merely to have created one more cramping kind of seriousness. Psychoanalysts were full of greedy explanations and peculiarly ironic blind-spots. 'So-called psychoanalysis,' he suggested, 'is the occupation of lustful rationalists who trace everything in the world to sexual causes - with the exception of their own occupation.' Kraus evolved a style, which could never be turned into a method, to show how ideas could be subtly dogmatised into propaganda.

In what he called 'this pseudonymous civilisation', it was literature that had to be 'an independent force, countering the pernicious influence of the press' in particular, and all the other potential forms of propaganda that disarmed criticism. Kraus's first ambition had been to be an actor. His contemporary, the playwright Frank Wedekind, thought Kraus had missed his vocation by not working in the theatre. He would describe himself instead as 'perhaps the first case of a writer who simultaneously experiences the process of writing as an actor'. Just as the mask was one of the unifying motifs of Die Fackel, and featured on the early covers, so the writer as actor was increasingly the role in which Kraus was to cast himself. It was Shakespeare who had shaped what Timms calls Kraus's 'histrionic imagination'. By the age of 30 he had seen 12 productions of King Lear; he was himself to do remarkable translations of Shakespeare into German. Shakespeare, for Kraus, was the exemplary artist. And from about 1905 he came to believe that the artist alone could resist the ideological pressures of the age - any age. Wilde was the contemporary artist who became Kraus's model for the artistic identity he was consciously trying to cultivate in his search for a true mask. He conceived of the artist, Timms writes,

as a self-sufficient figure. His sensitivity sets him apart from the philistinism of the surrounding world. And he tends to stand disdainfully aloof from the nexus of human society. He is essentially an inner-directed figure.

Although, as Timms shows, genial by inclination, Kraus always struggled to find a way of being sufficiently isolated to give an accurate warning of the catastrophe that he foresaw. 'I hear noises which others don't hear,' he wrote, 'and which disturb for me the music of the spheres, which others don't hear either.' The idea of the artist which Kraus had evolved was only a temporary solution to the general bewilderment of a culture that was disintegrating around him. Under the pressure of events, he began to do public performances of his own and other writers' work. Between 1910 and 1936 he gave over seven hundred recitals. Timms explains in convincing detail how in the same period the tone of his work changes to one of foreboding. He becomes, in Timms's phrase, 'a visionary satirist'. Timms quotes, with his own translation, what he calls a 'dream-aphorism' of February 1911:

I dreamed that they refused to believe that what I said was right. I maintained that there were ten of them. No, 12, they said. As many as there are fingers on a pair of hands, I said. Then one of them raised his hand and behold it had six fingers. All right then, 11, I said, appealing to the other hand. And behold it had six fingers. Sobbing I ran into the forest.

Although Die Fackel was the only Austrian newspaper critical of the war effort, the war itself was to reveal what Timms calls the 'glaring deficiency' in Kraus's critique of newspapers as propaganda. In March 1914 he reminded his readers of the Austrian Government's bribing of the press, yet by November of the same year he is suggesting that the authorities are not in fact to blame and that the Government should curb the freedom of the press. Kraus appeared to be mystifyingly naive about the actual workings of the press, vilifying individual editors and journalists, several of whom were Jews, who he must have known were not in charge. Timms's detailed account explains Kraus's 'fundamental argument ... that an apparatus now exists with an almost unlimited capacity for corrupting the public mind ... and that at moments of crisis it actively participates in a process of self-mystification.' But he also shows that Kraus's eagerness to name names and ride his contradictions undermined some of his shrewdest insights. During the 1914-18 war, six thousand men were killed every day. The Austrian press spoke of the war as a heroic crusade, but, in Kraus's view, made it sound more like an operetta: they were, he insisted, making it impossible to believe that people really died.

Between 1915 and 1922 Kraus worked on his epic documentary drama of the First World War, The Last Days of Mankind. He tried to find a form commensurate with the horrific magnitude of the event. Virtually unperformable with over two hundred scenes and an enormous cast of characters, Kraus described it as a 'tragedy' performed by 'figures from an operetta'. Timms defends the play as 'the submerged masterpiece of the 20th-century theatre', but it is possible that Kraus might have appreciated the irony of its present status as a symptomatic and intriguing failure. There is, of course, no full English translation available, and this raises the question of how Kraus is best represented to non-German readers. Great claims have been made for the importance of his work - in English most notably by George Steiner and Erich Heller - but he is known, if at all in England, as an influential contemporary of Wittgenstein and Freud, and as a writer of aphorisms. Auden, for example, in his Faber anthology has 24 entries by Kraus. So Harry Zohn's Selected Aphorisms, from which I have quoted in this review, is welcome, but also, in a sense, misleading. The aphorisms are inevitably taken out of context, which is of course in the nature of aphorisms: but what kind of picture would one get of Bacon, or Johnson, or Hazlitt from a comparable selection of aphorisms translated into German? Timms's book will be indispensable when we have that most unlikely thing, an English Kraus.

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Adam Phillips · How to be Viennese · LRB 5 March 1987

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In Fin de Siècle Vienna, politics had become the least convincing of the performing arts. Life, Kraus wrote, had become an effort that deserved a better cause. By the turn of the century, it was not politicians but actors, painters, writers and musicians who had captured the imagination of the upper-middle classes.

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Architectural masterpieces of Vienna

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Architectural masterpieces of Vienna and Otto Wagner  | Architecture | Showcase

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The Vienna Savings BanK

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Architecture. Otto Wagner The Vienna Savings Bank

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SHS Lecture from Curosity matters series 

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SHS Lecture from Curosity matters series 

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Planet e-stream