Klimt’s painting, Judith I (1901), depicts the biblical character holding the head of St John as she looks out to the viewer with an unnerving expression of seduction and ecstasy. Emotion through facial expression, was something new but very important to the artists of the secession. Perspective is abolished in favour of flat planes with just a carpet of flowers beneath them to ground the couple in some sort of reality. The couple that embrace in the middle are surrounded by blocks of colour, patterned shapes and gold Klimt’s signature colour. Klimt’s most famous piece, indeed, one of the most famous of all paintings, was The Kiss (painted in 1907-8) as It represented everything the movement came to signify. It not only covered fine art but also design, architecture and crafts, allowing various forms to unite under one artistic language There was a clear objective behind the Secession to promote international art in Austria and develop a more modernist and progressive convention. They held 24 large scale exhibitions between that year and 1905, with responses in equal amounts of praise and criticism. But in 1897 he and many other members, including Koloman Moser and Josef Hoffmann, established their own group that would be known as the Vienna Secession. Klimt had risen to fame painting murals in the magnificent Burgtheatre and History of Art Museum in the City and they conformed to the conventional ideas of realism, as did most of his early works.

With new ideas of symbolism occurring in Vienna and throughout Europe some members, notably Gustav Klimt, sort a way of representing the world through pictorial instincts rather than pure reality. It was founded in 1897 but continued to develop ideas through the first decades of the 20th Century.Īlthough the Kunstlerhaus held exhibitions for the city’s artists, the senior members favoured classical techniques and realistic paintings meaning that impressionist and modernist works were rejected. The Vienna Secession was a break away art movement set up by artists disillusioned with the traditional and oppressive art body the Kunstlerhaus.

The vienna secession artists