Art in Japan>European Art 1500-1930>Traum von Wien: Graphic Art in Vienna around 1900

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Traum von Wien: Graphic Art in Vienna around 1900

by John McGee

Young artists in fin-de-siecle Vienna were fed up with the dominant academy's stale restrictions and backwards glances. They had seen what was happening elsewhere in Europe and they too wanted modernism and artistic independence. So in 1897, Gustav Klimt, Kolo Moser, Josef Hoffman and others formed the Vienna Secession. 

Gustav Klimt, First Vienna Secession
poster, 1898, 95x69cm
(Images courtesy Urawa Art Museum)

The group was almost immediately successful. In their new design magazine, Ver Sacrum (Sacred Spring), they stated their purpose: "To arouse, sharpen and spread the artistic feeling of our time." Their first exhibition, held in 1898, attracted 57,000 visitors with work by contemporary European artists like Auguste Rodin and Puvis de Chavannes. The Secessionists were clever enough to insert some of their own art into the show, promoting themselves and their movement while making more than enough money to cover costs. By their second exhibition, they had their own building, a blocky white art temple crowned by a golden openwork sphere of laurel leaves. 

This "dream" (or "traum" in German) exhibition of 356 pieces, almost exclusively graphic works on paper (books, collages, drawings, etchings, lithographs, paintings and period photographs), begins in this optimistic air, with a series of Secession exhibitions posters and back issues of Ver Sacrum. From there, it follows the work of artists who spilled out of the Secession, including those who formed subsequent movements like the Wiener Werkstatte and those like Egon Schiele who followed in its wake. 

Dita Moser, 1908 Calendar, 1907, 
14.7x15.3cm 

Even rebels need role models. The Secessionists borrowed decorative elements from French Art Nouveau and a desire to eliminate barriers between the fine and applied arts from the British Arts and Crafts Movement. Also, like other European contemporaries, they were influenced by the bold color and strong asymmetrical graphics of imported Japanese woodblock prints. Klimt's famous poster for the first Secessionist exhibition, for example, incorporates several of these concepts, framing a white expanse with characters from Greek mythology. 

Judging by this exhibition, the Viennese artists shared some influences, though they spent more time experimenting than developing a unified style. In 1903, Kolo Moser birthed blobby salamander critters from the swirls of handmade marbled paper. His wife Dita Moser crammed her 1908 and 1910 calendar pages with simple, sophisticated combinations of flat figures, boxy lettering and storybook colors. Dynamic Ornament, a 1910 black-and-white lithograph from the school of Josef Hoffman, is a frenzy of reverberating and overlapping curves reminiscent of the Italian Futurists, in contrast to Hoffman's own fastidiously precise furniture drawings (1908-13). Early Oskar Kokoschka and Schiele figure sketches hint at the coming of expressionism. 

Egon Schiele, Portrait of Arthur
Roessler, 1914, 23.5x32cm 

This explosion of diversity flourished under popular support. Viennese artists produced an enormous amount of graphic arts (nearly all of the pieces here come from the collection of one anonymous European collector). They designed books of literature and architecture, poetry and song (the hardcover exhibition catalog replicates a handsome pattern of gold circles and dots on red by Kolo Moser). They made etchings and lithographs in which parrot feathers explode in pinks and purples, monochrome landscapes shimmer under moonlight, and big-haired Marie Antoinettes reveal their most explicit erotic pleasures. 

The coda to this dynamic display of decorative possibility is a 1918 political poster by the architect Richard Neutra. He shows Vienna as an isolated island high above a sea of skulls—World War I had snuffed out the golden light at the end of the Habsburg Empire.

This exhibition was held July-Aug 2003 at Urawa Art Museum in Urawa City, Saitama Prefecture, Japan.

©2006 John McGee

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