“All art is erotic.”― Gustav Klimt
The Vienna Secession (German: Wiener Secession; also known as the Union of Austrian Artists, or Vereinigung Bildender Künstler Österreichs) was an art movement formed in 1897 by a group of Austrian artists who had resigned from the Association of Austrian Artists, housed in the Vienna Künstlerhaus.
Secession Building Vienna (1897-98)
Its somewhat unconventional appearance led detractors to nickname it "Mahdi's Tomb" or the "Assyrian Convenience," but its location on the former site of a vegetable market also led to the nickname of "The Golden Cabbage" for the lattice of leaves in the dome.Jun 7, 2017.
"Sitzmaschine" reclining armchair, model no. 670, c. 1905. Josef Hoffmann; Maker: Jacob & Josef Kohn.
Notice the frame of the chair: single pieces of beech wood have been carefully manipulated to form a continuous support. Originally designed for patients at a nursing home, this recliner can be easily adjusted by moving a rod between the circular knobs on the back arms of the chair. Hoffmann created a chair that allows both its construction and function to be visible. This Sitzmaschine (Sitting Machine) embodies the Wiener Werkstätte’s (Vienna Workshops’) emphasis on clean craftsmanship, geometric form, and material integrity.
Figure 2: April 2014. RE-ISSUED: THE TUBULAR STEEL CLUB CHAIR S 35 WITH FOOTSTOOL IN TWO HIGH-QUALITY LEATHER VERSIONS
Design: Marcel Breuer, 1928/29
After several years, Thonet takes the club chair S 35 by Marcel Breuer and matching footstool S 35 H back into its program. The Frankenberg company presents the tubular steel chair in two fine leather versions: with black full grain core leather and with brown buffalo hide. The latter is part of the successful Pure Materials collection, which is characterized by nickel-plated tubular steel and oiled wood. Breuer's design of the chair on skids with a flexing seat dates back to the years 1928/29.Thonet has been producing the cantilever chair since 1930.
The S 35 is special due to its unusual construction: Marcel Breuer had succeeded to realize all functions of a tubular steel cantilever chair in a single, uninterrupted line. The cantilever effect was doubled because the armrests, which flex independently from the seat, balanced the flexing of the back frame of the cantilever seat. The original version of the S 35 respectively B 35 -under the latter name the chair was listed in the product catalogs from the 1930s -was stretched with iron yarn and had wooden armrests. Soon, however, there were versions with wicker cane, leather and cowhide as well as upholstered versions. The cantilever club chair B 35 was first presented in 1930 at the Paris Grand Palais as a contribution of the Deutscher Werkbund.
The Vienna Secession was created as a reaction to the conservatism of the artistic institutions in the Austrian capital at the end of the 19th 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 20th 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.
