Ver Sacrum, the group’s magazine, spread the refined taste of new decorations throughout Europe, feeding the need for renewal in the applied arts, comparable, according to this modern and unexpected vision, to the ‘ liberal arts’.
A movement long dominated by the figure of Gustav Klimt, president until 1904 and supported by the passion of journalist and critic Ludwig Hevesi. A building designed by Joseph Maria Olbrich, which bore the proud inscription ‘To every age its art, to every art its freedom’ as the headquarters.
The Vienna Secession, launched in 1897, came after the Munich secession in 1892, that of Dresden in 1893 and Berlin in 1895. For Wiener Werkstätte, the relationship between the artisan and the industry was instead a connection that exists and demands a solution, almost anticipating Bauhaus but with less branchées with political implications and without certainly indicating salvation. The fundamental role of the artisan is well defined in Arts and Crafts, where the return to handicrafts aimed to identify a society capable of recovering the values of medieval communities, in stark contrast with the alienation of industrial organization. The impossibility of extrapolating art from the hic et nunc of everyday life, towards strong, compact ideals, explains the interest for Wiener Wekstätte in all forms of languages, architecture and painting in particular, but also in the sphere of applied art. A fact that rises as a common denominator and yet separates the Viennese experience from the contemporary experiences of the German Deutscher Werkbundt and the British Arts and Crafts movement. An oxymoron that swings between objectivism and romanticism, between the will to live and imminent death, pervading the cultural approach that spanned from the Secession to Wiener Werkstätte. The world, for Wittgenstein, is the total sum of facts, not things. An attitude that became a leitmotiv in the philosophical work of Ludwig Joseph Wittgenstein who, with his Tractatus logico-philosophicus, started with the need to create precise rules for language, and in the phases to follow would become an advocate for dissolving the meaning of words in the interpretation game. A movement that embodied in the work of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, contradiction that emerged in the melancholy of the music composed by Mahler, by Alexander von Zemlinsky and by Richard Strauss, particularly in the wistfulness of Der Rosenkavalier.
A consideration marked by grim prophesies and controlled by the premonition that it concerns ‘the last days of humanity’. Finis Austriae, an apocalypse that should have ended in 1918, with the definitive fall of the Hapsburg eagle, following the defeat of the central empires in the First World War, gave rise to a cultural movement that confirmed how art required total renewal and a modern approach to adapt to the Zeitgeist. A definition that summarizes the ambivalence in the Viennese and Central European culture of that time. This is how Karl Kraus baptised the crucible of art, philosophy and innovation in Vienna between the late nineteenth century and the first two decades of the 20th century. ‘The experimental station of the end of the world’. Karl Kraus thus baptizes the melting pot of art, thought and innovation in Vienna between the end of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth century