Vienna: Art & Design-Klimt, Schiele, Hoffman, Loos (review)

Vienna: Art & Design, at Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria, is devoted to the Vienna secession movement and its spin-off, the Wiener Werkstätte. Part of the gallery’s 150th birthday celebrations, the exhibition builds on the strength of the gallery’s modern Viennese design collection. To this it adds items drawn from private collections as well as Vienna’s Österreichische Galerie Belvedere and Wien Museum.

Four years in the making and displaying over three hundred items, the southern hemisphere has never before had an exhibition of this size and scale devoted to showing the wellspring of creativity and innovation that sprang from fin-de-siècle Vienna. Illustrating the constellation of achievements in architecture and interior design, graphic design, and the decorative arts achieved in Vienna between 1897 and 1917, Melbourne’s exhibition is one of several presented in the past two decades to explore the ambivalent energies of modernity that these achievements illustrate.

The exhibition is co-curated by curators at the National Gallery of Victoria working with their Viennese-based counterparts, Christian Witt-Dörring and Dr. Paul Asenbaum. Formerly responsible for the furniture collection at Vienna’s MAK–Austrian Museum of Applied Arts (1974–2004), Witt-Dörring is now consulting curator at New York’s Neue Galerie. An expert on Wiener Werkstätte silver and jewelry, Asenbaum guided Ronald Lauder with the silver now displayed at the Neue Galerie.

Wildfire urban expansion in late nineteenth-century Vienna generated an artistic and intellectual flowering. Vienna’s population grew from 470,000 in 1857, to over a million by 1890. With Vienna the Hapsburg capital to some 51 million people within the Dual Monarchy (1867–1918), cross fertilization of languages and cultures from Austria’s empire of “united nations” was such within Vienna that Robert Musil wrote in The Man Without Qualities that there arose in the city a kindling fever, when people hurled themselves enthusiastically upon the new. Forces of change met the forces of tradition: the capital of the ancient Hapsburg dynasty became the city of Bruckner, Mahler, Schönberg, Freud, Wittgentstein, and Rilke. Fin-de-siècle Vienna is consequently seen as a modernist crucible.

In 1897 nineteen young artists defected from the Künstlerhaus. Intent on exploring art outside academic tradition, secession artists aimed to create a new style free from historical influences. They ushered in two decades of unparalleled creativity, a “golden age,” in Viennese cultural and intellectual life. Melbourne’s exhibition centers on Klimt (first secessionist president), Egon Schiele, Josef Hoffmann and Adolf Loos. Each was key to the ‘new spirit’ that swept through Vienna. Their radical and edgy work, freshly expressing art and design, challenged traditional taste and provoked innovative creations, fitting for the new century, from other artists and designers.

The exhibition opens by looking at turn-of-the-century Vienna, where artistic patronage was an effective route to status and prestige—particularly among Jewish industrialists, merchants, and banking families who were granted full participation in Viennese life only late in the century. Klimt’s watercolor, Interior view of the old Hofburg Theatre (1888) and Wilhelm Gause’s Ball der Stadt Wien (1904) set the scene. When juxtaposed against drawings by Otto Wagner—[Elevated train over Gumpendorferzeile (1898); The Metropolis: Bird’s eye-view of centre of 22nd district (1911)]—the disparities in early modern Vienna are clear.

Photographs and perspective views feature Wagner’s designs of apartment buildings (1881– 1909). Regarded as the father of Viennese early modern style, fixtures and furniture items he designed for the Post Office Savings Bank (1902–1906) show his reaction against the depleted historicized vocabulary of Viennese high Victorian taste, which was exhausted in the service of middle-class pretension. Wagner evolved a modern vocabulary that is spare and geometricized.

But the eclectic ways of the Ringstrasse that Wagner loudly deplored haunted the search for “honest” modernity. More complex ways of quoting historical references and new ornamental motifs appeared inside the new unornamented buildings. Illustrating this is a suite...