To every age its art and to art its freedom
Motto of the Viennese Secessionists (1897)
The National Gallery of Victoria are currently holding an exhibition of the works of artists and architects living in Vienna at the turn into the twentieth century. The exhibition begins with a general exposition on the social and political climate surrounding Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century. Industry grew on carbon, coal and steel. Public transport was constructed. The medieval fortifications were pulled down and replaced with boulevards. Apartment buildings began to grow as the new domicile for Viennese citizens. There were a few photographs at the NGV exhibition of men standing outside their workers’ cottages with brooms in hand while a fresh apartment building looms over their homes. Urbanisation came to Vienna as the city spread its wings, incorporating a spread of communities into the Gesellschaft of Vienna and setting the stage for the artists Klimt and later, his protege, Egon Schiele, and their “Secession” from the conservativism of State-building.
Beneath the exterior facade of new economic developments and infrastucture and the installation of a revived historicism, the Jugendstil was conceived. Schiele’s Secession poster with his artist friends invokes the transmutation of bread into flesh, wine into blood, image into art. Amidst the industrial noises of the urban state apparatus, a body without organs was miraculating the distribution of emotion and intensity created and felt by a new art movement enjoying the luxury of a new wealth and affording a time for reflection and rumination, a voluptuous revolution.
The Gesamtkunstwerk (“total work of art”) was a central concept in the Jugendstil (“youth style”). The living rooms and the work spaces should not be exempt from the work of art. Ornate carvings and paintings were added to furniture, lifting the chair beyond its simple facade as a function of reclining.
Architects and painters worked together to produce whole works of art, draw lines and add dimension to the everyday work life of Vienna.
The landscape of the countryside was also acted upon by the modernisation of Vienna and Schiele paid witness to the event in his landscape paintings, a remarkable departure from the twisted, writing and catatonic figures of his portraits, the romantic aesthete looking back in to a rural community that would drive him out, for a subject of art
The interiority of being-human in Vienna circa 1900 produced the new works of art in collaboration, a community of painters and philosophers. Beethoven – the old Romantic – was the composer Klimt honoured in his frieze at the Vienna secession building. In the offices of Herr Sigmund Freud, the seething underbelly of a perverse family life of sexual abuse and misaligned passions (the minotaur of Klimt’s first Secessionist painting) were given voice and embedded into neurosis.
The unconscious as a working body without organs was being discovered and created for a fate worse than death: a living prison on a couch and a ready-made straightjacket of delirium that Freud’s work would become until Lacan returns Freud to the surface level of metaphor and metonym (a similar service Nietzsche did for Jesus and his gospel in The Anti-Christ). The anti-establishment has it place and freedom in the catharsis of modernity and the artists of the Jugendstil live on a hundred years later as their canvases and architecture come to Melbourne for exhibition in this the twenty-first century, a brand new modern age of silicon to succeed carbon.
