see also:

Art Nouveau

2 Art Nouveau II: Scotland, Austria, and Germany

 

Art Nouveau was a major influence on design not only in England and France but also in other parts of Europe. In focusing on artists who worked in Glasgow, Vienna, and various German cities, this chapter traces a number of artists' groups that developed a visual language that was overall more sym­metrical, rectilinear, and abstract than that of their French and English contemporaries. Broadly speaking it also traces a shift from art centered on the evocative potential of line, form, and color to one that eschews ornamental effects in favor of simplicity and clarity.  In addition to providing a survey of major works, this chapter will focus on three recurring themes. First, it explores the continuing attempts by artists to collapse the hierarchical relationship between the "fine arts" of painting, sculp­ture, and architecture, and the less esteemed "crafts" - a category that included graphic design. Second, the belief in the feasibility of artist-led Utopias, or perfect worlds, which served as an escapist alternative to the alienating spaces of the industrial age, is considered. Third, the chapter discusses the use of design styles as a marker of national or regional identity, which celebrated the accomplishments of society under the leadership of bourgeois industrialists.

The Four
 

Four artists—Margaret Macdonald (1864-1933), Frances Macdonald (1873-1921), Herbert MacNair (1868-1955), and Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1925)—together formed the larger part of the Art Nouveau movement in Scotland. None of these artists worked professionally as a graphic designer; however, the limited works that they did produce were to prove influential, and secured for Scotland a stable niche in the history of the Art Nouveau movement. This partnership, called The Four, consisted of two sisters and their respective husbands-to-be, as Frances Macdonald and Herbert MacNair married in 1899, while Margaret Macdonald and Mackintosh followed suit a year later.

The Glasgow School of Art, Celtic Revival

The city of Glasgow itself is important to an understanding of the Art Nouveau movement centered there. A nineteenth-century "boom town," Glasgow had undergone startling urban growth during the Industrial Revolution. The rapid changes in its econ­omy had created a vast economic chasm between the nascent bourgeoisie with their fortunes and the workers who toiled in the factories. In fact, the city became rather notorious as a vulgar, blighted industrial zone, a reputation that most likely partly reflected English chauvinism. The decorative elegance of Scottish Art Nouveau produced at the Glasgow School of Art (GSA) should be understood in this context, in which art served to provide an alternative world, from which the difficulties of the industrial age could be conveniently banished. At the same time, the art produced at the school also served to reject this caricature of the city and rejoice in the affluence of the Glasgow bourgeoisie, a social class that included the Macdonald sisters. In fact, the sisters' education in the visual arts represented a typical step for young women from the more progressive, affluent families. Finally, the spirit of the Arts and Crafts movement, in which the fine arts and applied arts were equally valued, was intended to act as a democratizing force, one that could in some small way combat the general perception of urban life as rife with social and economic injustices.
The collaboration began when the Macdonald sisters enrolled in the Glasgow School of Art in 1893. Once there, the sisters found a supportive group of fellow students determined to engage the newest artistic trends. "The Immortals," as these young women called themselves, were excited by Japonisme as well as by  the "decadent" artists gathered around Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde in England . However, the students at the GSA sought to carve out a unique, and specifically Celtic-inspired, visual style and subject matter. In a parallel to French designers' embrace of the Rococo, Scottish artists wanted to establish their art as pan of a national tradition. The Four were influenced by the Celtic revival of this era, as evidenced by the continuing fascination with the works of "Ossian," an epic poet whose writings were filled with Celtic symbolism as well as supernatural adventure. ("Ossian" was in fact an invention perpetrated by the author James MacPherson (1736-1796) in 1761 —MacPherson is credited with sparking the search for a historically distinct Celtic identity.) The Four were also aware of more recent scholarship, such as Architecture, Mysticism, and Myth (1891), a book by W.R. Lethaby (1857-1931) that argued in favor of the prominence of magic, supernatural strivings, and subjective responses in architectural theory. A favorite of the Arts and Crafts Society in London, Lethaby advocated the relationship between architecture and design crafts.

   For artists desiring to showcase new work, the importance of publications and willing patrons cannot be underestimated. At the GSA, a group of progressive students organized themselves around a journal they called The Magazine (published 1893-6); it was in the November 1894 cover of that periodical that Frances Macdonald published one of the first works, a watercolor, that displays the seeds of mature style. Called A Pond, the image combines sinuous, organically shaped figures and water plants with a symmetrical organization (fig. 2.1). The attenuated grace of the figures is derivative of a number of other Art Nouveau designs; however, its combination of orthogonal structure and fluid, curvilinear forms, especially at the bottom of the image, as well as its nearly perfect symmetry (the left and right are mirror images outside of the textual elements), suggests the beginnings of a bold new graphic style. The decorative type of the word "November" reverses these two elements, as it combines rectilinear letterforms with strong asymmetrical elements. As is the case with many Scottish posters from this era, the palette, featuring a mix of green, purple, and indigo, clearly invokes a set of colors with strong associations to the Scottish identity movement. The subject is evocative and ambiguous, suggestive of mystical creatures who embody the spirit of this watery environment. The female forms decisively reject the prevailing "decadent" images of women as seductive temptresses, as Macdonald's figures exude mystery and ambiguity without defining that mystery in sexual terms.
 

2.1 Frances Macdonald, A Pond, 1894. Watercolor. Glasgow School of Art Collection.

Early Poster Design

In 1895, the Macdonald sisters received their first graphic design commission, a poster for Drooko Royal Umbrellas (fig. 2.2). ("Drooko" is Scottish for "drench.") The owner of the company, Joseph Wright, hired the sisters to promote the product, which had inspired the verse, "I walk the world a raintight fellow/Beneath the Joseph Wright Umbrella." The composition is made up of three vertical bands that are for the most part disconnected from one another. The box of organic elements on the lower left is separate from both the text above it, as well as the attenuated figure in the central space. There has been some attempt to connect the simplified central figure with the flowers on the far right, using the figure's hand, which becomes more plant-like closer to the floral forms, and with the product itself, as the umbrella spans the gap between the center and righthand spaces. The faintly floral-shaped umbrella frames the figure's face, but is not situated in a way that draws attention to the product— which, lost in the background, is the presumed focus of the poster's message.

   The first poster by the Macdonald sisters in collaboration with Herbert MacNair displays many of the stylistic devices seen in A Pond, albeit in a more staunchly vertical format (fig. 2.3). Advertising the GSA's 1895 student show, the poster superim­poses long, sinewy figures with similarly attenuated plant forms. The most striking element of the symmetrical design is the way the female figure's hair and the male figure's hooded cloak both sweep around behind them and form part of the surrounding abstract design. The hand-drawn lettering of this lithograph has a number of dramatic flairs, despite its overall blocky proportions. For example, the arms of the "F" and "E" both extend out of the em box (the implied frame) in a dramatic fashion, while the arm of the "L" in "Glasgow" appropriates the baselines under the "as" as it runs horizontally across the poster. Also, the strong oblique stress of the "S" as well as the merged characters in "the" both create some unique visual emphasis. The text is not directly inte­grated with the image, but rather formed into a geometric block that creates a plinth on which the figures above are perched as if they are sculpted. The entire composition is made up of a series of boxes that encase more organic forms. The simple, flat forms bounded by bold black contour lines arc indicative of the prevailing Japanese influence.

 

	Celtic Manuscripts and The Four
	The art of "The Four" was strongly influenced by Celtic art, especially by its celebrated illuminated manuscripts. While Celtic art can be found across much of Europe and even farther afield, its artistic centers were in Ireland, Scotland, and Northumbria in the British Isles. Although the term "Celtic art" can refer as far back as to the ancient works of the La Tene culture (450 B.C.E—600 C.E), it is also used broadly to refer to the medieval art produced in this region between 500-1000 C.E. A mix of pagan and Christian styles and subject matter, Celtic art represents one of the great examples of cross-cultural ferment that char­acterized the Middle Ages. Later, in Ireland as well as in Scottish cities such as Glasgow during the mid-nineteenth century, there was a resur­gence of interest in Celtic art for nationalistic reasons, and also because of the broader celebration of medieval culture that lay at the heart of the Arts and Crafts movement. Characteristics of Celtic art include dense interlaced patterns, curvilinear elements, and zoomorphic forms. Although many of the abstract elements were invented by metalworkers working in three dimensions with raised linear elements, a sophisticated knowledge of color allowed artists working in two dimensions to replicate the spirals and flowing, knotted forms. Typically, manuscript illuminators displayed great skill in devising elaborate initial capitals, with letters that transformed themselves into beasts or abstract shapes while maintaining a recognizable typography. These flourishes served as a model for The Four. A major center of medieval Celtic manuscript production was in a monastery on the island of Iona off the western coast of Scotland. When the monks of Iona fled from marauding Vikings around 800, they settled in Kells on the Irish coast. The resulting Book of Kells from the early ninth century represents the ultimate achievement of the manuscript tradition. It was published in a facsimile edition in 1892, fueling a burst of creativity during the later stages of the Celtic revival. In the 1890s, the tendency of The Four to mix curvilinear elements with strong geometric structures would have derived from their knowledge of the Celtic manuscript tradition.

see also:

Charles Rennie Mackintosh

Charles Rennie Mackintosh

Charles Rennie Mackintosh was the last addition to The Four's collaborative group. Trained as an architect, he had met MacNair in 1889, when they both worked at an architectural firm. Between 1889 and 1894, MacNair and Mackintosh both took classes at the GSA. Later, Mackintosh worked as an architectural draftsman for much of the 1890s in the small Glasgow architectural firm of Honeyman & Keppie. By 1895 The Four were complete. Mackintosh's 1896 poster advertising the Scottish Musical Review, a periodical, features much of the same mix of curvilinear and rectilinear elements visible in the earlier posters (fig. 2.4). It also features the "Scottish" palette of purple, indigo, and green as well as the use of the text box as a pedestal for the centralized image of a figure. However, perhaps because of his architectural training, Mackintosh's style leans more heavily on geometric, architectonic elements and so appears weightier than the other works. The Scottish Musical Review poster also has a very strong phallic element in the shaping of the figure as well as its erect bulb and stem floral combinations, introducing an element of sexuality that was not apparent in the earlier posters.

The Four exhibited their work outside Glasgow for the first time in 1896. At the fifth exhibition of the Arts and Crafts Society in London, they found their works harshly criticized: one piece by Mackintosh was called "grotesque," by both academic conservatives and members of the society. Followers of William Morris at this time were still wedded to the idea of the preemi­nence of historicist styles, and they rejected the fluid abstractions of The Four. Only the journal The Studio had anything positive to say about the group, recognizing their allegiance to Art Nouveau, which the journal backed. In the same year, a critic at the conser­vative Magazine of Art was to invent a memorable label for the works produced at the GSA, calling the institution the "Spook School" because of the preponderance of wraithlike figures in pieces such as A Pond. The Four, particularly, found much greater acclaim in 1900, when the eighth Vienna Secession exhibition featured a Scottish Room (fig. 2.5) When Margaret Macdonald and Mackintosh visited the show, they were widely celebrated by the Secession artists, who shared many of their ideals, such as a rejection of the hierarchical distinction between fine and applied art, as well as their interest in pursuing decorative Art Nouveau graphics.

A compelling parallel to The Four's graphic work can be found in Mackintosh's interior designs for the Glasgow School of Art itself. In 1897, the firm of Honeyman & Keppie, using a project created by Mackintosh, won the competition for the design of a new building for the GSA. The resulting interior spaces, such as the Library (fig, 2.6), feature much of the complex mix of symmetry and asymmetry, organic and rectilinear, that characterizes the work of The Four. The coffered grid of the ceiling is balanced with the sometimes irregular curves of the beams and arches to form a composition that has a graceful, linear feel. The library calls to mind the words of the architect Edward Lutyens (1864-1944), who said of another Mackintosh work that it was "all very elaborately simple."

    Scottish tearooms provide an excellent example of a new type of establishment that reflected changes in social class as a result of the industrial revolution. Tearooms, sometimes called "Ladies' Luncheon Rooms," provided a new social space where women could socialize in public while avoiding unwanted association with the sordid reputation of the city's pubs and nightclubs. Macdonald and Mackintosh found their most loyal patron in the owner of a number of successful tearooms, Catherine Cranston (1850-1934). Cranston, a supporter of the temperance movement, wanted her establishments to project a refined elegance, yet also to suggest the excitement of the modern city. Macdonald and Mackintosh eventually produced designs for four of her tearooms, attempting to create an overall vision that would integrate all the different elements of each room, from chairs to wall coverings, in a single aesthetic. The Ingram Street Tearoom was decorated with Macdonald's gesso panel The May Queen (fig. 2.7), which had already garnered a great deal of praise from the Secession artists when it was shown in Vienna in 1900. Featuring a strong linear element that would appear to have been influenced by Beardsley, the panel harmonizes this curvilinear element with a blocky rectilinear composition. Mackintosh's Argyle chair (1897), designed to make a dramatic statement at Cranston's Argyle Street Tearoom, was also exhibited at the Vienna Secession. The oak chair shares the vertical emphasis of the posters made by The Four, and trans­lates the graphic conventions they developed, especially in the shaping of the large ellipse that forms the top rail and the thin posts that support that curving shape.

An important point concerning the historical reputation of The Four is the manner in which their original collaborative ideal, which resonated with the medieval revivalism of the Arts and Crafts movement, was later effaced because of the modern focus on the individual. During their lifetimes, the sense that first the Macdonald sisters, and then Margaret Macdonald and Mackintosh, had worked synergistically, was a given, even though they did not receive much acclaim in their native Scotland. In 1900 in Vienna, Macdonald and Macintosh were equally feted as accomplished Scottish artists. In the 1960s, when interest in the An Nouveau was revived, a new generation of design historians focused on Mackintosh to the almost total exclusion of the other artists. In exhibitions held in Zurich, New York, Paris, and London during the 1960s, Mackintosh was given a progressively greater place, celebrated as an individual genius. Today, he is a cornerstone of design history, while the other three of The Four have been pushed somewhat out of the picture. In particular, Margaret Macdonald's contribution to the couple's work is woefully understated in many design histories.
 

2.4 Charles Rennie Mackintosh, The Scottish Musical Review, 1896.
Lithograph. Mackintosh Collection.

2.5 Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald-Mackintosh,
Room Designed for the Eighth Vienna Secession, 1900. Glasgow School of Art Collection.

Vienna Secession
 

In Vienna, graphic design was an integral pan of the Secession movement, led by Gustav Klimt (1862-1918). The artists' group called the Vienna Secession was formed in March 1897 by an initial group of eighteen artists who felt that the two artists' organizations in Vienna, the Vienna Academy of the Arts and the Genossenschafc Bildender Kiinstler Wiens, were out of touch with the newer styles and artistic theories that were spreading across Europe. In the eyes of the Secessionists, the Academy was an aged institution hopelessly wedded to the academic art of the past. The Genossenschaft, a word that refers to its status as an artists' "coop­erative," was founded in 1870 and devoted to contemporary art. Sometimes referred to as the Kunstlerhaus, or "artists' house," it was controlled in the 1890s by men with quite conservative taste. Because the Academy and the Genossenschaft controlled the only public exhibition spaces in Vienna, the Secession artists' first goal was to create an alternative organization with an exhibition venue through which more progressive artists, from both Vienna and abroad, could present their work to the public. The term "secession" means a withdrawal, and it is from the Genossenschaft that the artists originally broke away. Like Art Nouveau artists throughout the rest of Europe, the Secessionists felt that the experience of modern industrial society could be successfully interpreted only by artists open to new aesthetic strategies. And, in fact, the term Secessionstil became yet another synonym for Art Nouveau style.

EXPLORATION: Gustav Klimt

Gustav Klimt

 

The first item of business for the Secession artists was to hold an exhibition. This first Secession show met with an indifferent public, and its rented venue, the headquarters of the Viennese Horticultural Society, was unremarkable. Gustav Klimt, who had been elected President of the Secession group, produced a poster for the show that set the tone for much of the art that would follow (fig. 2.8). In terms of style, Klimt adopted the vertical format, asymmetrical design, and empty spaces that had been a key part of Aubrey Beardsley's designs in England. The figure on the righthand edge is Athena, ancient goddess of Wisdom, whose armor references the Secession's struggle to free itself from conservative artistic tradition. In a band across the top of the poster the mythical struggle of Theseus with the Minotaur is played out as yet another allegory of heroic artistic struggle against philistinism.

The monochrome drawing of Theseus is contained in a horizontal band that is balanced at the bottom of the poster by another colorless band, this one containing the text publicizing the exhibition. The sumptuous color of the figure of Athena neatly ties the two elements together. In the upper left of the image, the words "Ver Sacrum" ("Sacred Spring") appear, an oft-repeated slogan of the Secession that refers to yet another mythological story, one in which ancient citizens experience new­found abundance after a calamity. Ver Sacrum was also the title given to an influential journal published by the group, and Klimt reused the image portion of this poster for another one that publicized the journal (see below). The fact that French Symbolist ideas influenced Secession art works is clear in the subject matter of this poster—mainly, the sense that the underlying message is mysterious, ambiguous, and gives priority to the subjective emotional responses of the artist.

    It might seem ironic that a Secession artist such as Klimt, who valued his own novelty and avantgardist views on art and culture highly, would choose to represent the Secessionist struggle in seemingly archaic, mythological terms. However, in 1890s' Vienna, Classical myths were often used to explain quite modern situations, most notably in the work of the Viennese psychoana­lyst Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), whose developing theories of sexuality often relied on analogies with Classical mythology as an explanatory tool—as in the "Oedipus complex." The fin desikle ambience of Vienna was enhanced by a palpable sexual atmosphere that informed much of the graphic work done there, as well as the emerging psychoanalytic theories of Freud. It was in fact the strong sexual undercurrent in the poster, manifest in the exposed genitals of Theseus, that caused the authorities to censor it. Klimt then produced a second version, which covered the offending organs with the trunk of a tree.

    Nuda Veritas ("Naked Truth"; 1899) is a fine example of Klimt's propensity for combining sumptuous decorative designs with sexually charged, if ambiguous, subjects (fig. 2.9). The painting was exhibited at the fourth Secession exhibition, held in the spring of 1899. There is a strong contrast between the visionary abstraction of the flat, decorative background and the realistically rendered nude woman. This contrast creates a world of allegorical fantasy as well as the suggestion of contemporary sexual intimacy. The Symbolist-inspired figure of truth, presented Eve-like with a serpent coiling around her ankles (and connecting the text of the title with the image), seems to float ethereally in a hazy atmosphere of soft blues. This figure had a longstanding association with alchemy and other esoteric traditions, where she often repre­sented the sexual fusing of male and female as part of a spiritual transformation. Above the figure, text by the German Romantic poet Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805) reads: "If you cannot please all men by thine actions and by thine art, then please the few; it is bad to please the many"—a reference to the enlightened few, initiates, who appreciated the art of the Secession.

 

The Secession Building

 

A key goal for the Secessionists was to control an exhibition space of their own. The young architect Josef Maria Olbrich (1867-1908) was chosen to design the building (fig.2.10), which was to be located on the Ringstrasse, Vienna's most fashionable avenue. The Ringstrasse had been itself constructed as recently as the 1860s, and the style of its architecture was particularly anathema to the Secessionists. They objected to the fact that it was made up of a series of historicist structures that quoted from all manner of past styles. The Secession artists wanted to make a public statement by locating their innovative exhibition hall and headquarters right in the thick of what they saw as an eclectic mass of tired-looking Neoclassicism. However, because of some official displeasure with Olbrich's design, the building was soon moved to the lessfashionable Karlsplatz. It is important to note that despite this setback, as well as the artists' antagonistic stance toward official culture, the Secession group generally found the government of the city of Vienna to be willing to help them reach their goals. Additionally, Secession artists quickly found patrons among the wealthy bourgeoisie. These included luminaries such as Karl Wittgenstein (1847-1913), scion of a powerful industrial family, who financed the construction of the Secession building.

Olbrich's design was executed in a matter of months, and it was soon recognized as one of the most notable manifestations of Viennese Art Nouveau architecture. Combining geometric clarity with a garland of gold over the main entrance, Olbrich's creation appeared startlingly severe with its strong axial symmetry. The building creates an unusual contrast between the blank spaces on the cube-shaped walls of the exterior facade and a roof whose elaborate decorations and skylights evoked to its critics both a "gilded cabbage" and a "greenhouse." More notable, in reality, is the way the blank spaces on the facade resonate with the comparable void used in Klimt's poster for the first Secession exhibition. Both artists valued the startling effect of so much emptiness in the midst of a design that is otherwise rich with decoration.

The effort made by Secession artists to unify different media with a holistic aesthetic is an important part of most Art Nouveau movements. The underlying principle at work is that of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or "total work of art," a concept originated by the German composer Richard Wagner and made popular by the French Symbolist movement. A Gesamtkunstwerk is an an work that encompasses every possible type of aesthetic expression. Wagner felt that he could attain this goal through his operatic compositions, which combined elements drawn from literary, musical, and visual artistic traditions. The French Symbolists, most of whom revered Wagner and his work, emphasized the mystical and spiritual elements of a unification of the arts. For visual artists, the Gesamtkunstwerkwas more of a theoretical goal than a concrete reality. Nonetheless, Secession artists and others with their same goals sought to implement the idea of a unifica­tion of the arts in as many ways as possible.

While some of the decorative relief panels that edge the blocky mass of the Secession building feature dramatic curvilinear elements, the organic lines are always more tightly controlled by the compositional scheme than they are in, for example, French Art Nouveau. Above the lintel of the main entrance a carving read, "To each age its art. To art its freedom," a credo that resonates with the spirit of revolution and embrace of the modern that was an integral part of Art Nouveau artistic theory. The dome of cascading laurel leaves above this inscription evoked the wreath worn by Apollo, allegorical patron of the arts. Combined with an orthogonal design reminiscent of Egyptian temple architecture, the building was suggestive of the spiritual attitude that the Secessionists had to their work. Inside, the most innovative part of Olbrich's design was immediately evident; the exhibition space featured movable panels, creating an "open plan" that could be rearranged in order to allow the space to take on new forms in short order.
 

2.10 Josef Olbrich. Secession Building, 1898

Poster and Journal Design

 

In November 1898, Olbrich's building was the site of the second Secession exhibition. For both that show and the third, a poster designed by the architect, and featuring his building, publicized the venue as well as its contents (fig. 2.11). This vertical-format lithograph depicts the Secession building's front facade centered at the top of the poster, emphasizing its severe geometric scheme. The lower half of the image features hand-drawn text of two dis­tinct, and not particularly harmonious, designs. Other than the centering of the justified text in a rectangular shape, there is no clear relationship between it and the image. It would seem that in this poster Olbrich relied heavily on the "star power" of his build­ing's main entrance, feeling that it alone was enough to make a striking poster.

The Secession journal Ver Sacrum, established in 1898, was the locus of a great deal of experimental graphic work. The journal had been proposed at the first general assembly of the Secession artists in June 1897, as an Austrian answer to the popular Art Nouveau periodicals in Germany, Pan and Jugend. Koloman Moser (1868-1918), one of the founders of the movement, was chosen to organize the journal. The first issue appeared early in 1898, featuring a cover designed by Alfred Roller (1864-1935), the journal's first editor (fig. 2.12). An introductory essay in the first issue declared that Ver Sacrum "aims to show other countries for the first time that Austria is an independent artistic entity. ... [I]t is meant to be a clarion call to the artistic sense of the people, to inspire, promote, and spread artistic life and artistic independence." In this manner, the Secessionists identified their own work as representative of national identity. (Austria was, of course, the dominant part of the larger Austro-Hungarian Empire under Emperor Franz Josef.) Inspired by the theory of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the journal was intended to engage with both the performing and literary arts, as well as the visual ones.

The editors of Ver Sacrum, especially the graphic designer Roller, sought to integrate typography, ornament, and image into a unified art work on the page, again influenced by the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk. The individual issues generally each sported a single theme (the fourth one, for example, was dedicated to Moser's drawings and other graphics), and the implementation of a unified visual style extended even to the advertisements, which were usually designed by Secession members themselves. A striking example of the type of innovative designs produced for Ver Sacrum is Moser's cover for the February 1899 issue, number 2 (fig.2.13), for which he drew an allegorical female figure emerging from lush tendrils that create powerful abstract forms. The flattened planes of her face suggest the influence of Japanese aesthetics, while the subject resonates with the Japanese tradition of Bijin-ga. In fact, Japanese art also held a special fascination for the Secession artists, who dedicated their sixth exhibition (in 1900) to it. The decorative lettering features the same sense of flow as is found in Japanese art. The curvilinear details of individual characters, such as the curving "v" and elon­gated "s" of the title (almost touching the woman's hair), match the overall form of the drawing. The unusual square format of Ver Sacrum also garnered attention, and is suggestive of the cubic spaces in Olbrich's building and Klimt's exhibition poster.

Koloman Moser also contributed a poster publicizing one of the Secession exhibitions, this one for the thirteenth show, held in 1902 (fig. 2,14). By then, many of the Secession artists had shifted to a decorative scheme built on orthogonal principles. Partly influenced by the Scottish design principles that had made a huge splash at the eighth Secession exhibition in 1900, a subset of the Secessionists adopted not only a new style but also a new tone, in which subjective, Symbolist-influenced flights of fancy were eschewed in favor of a more straightforward subject matter. At the same time, geometric pattern, which does not lend itself to the sort of sensual atmosphere favored by Klimt, became a more important visual element. In this poster, Moser uses a scheme of three figures arranged symmetrically in a vertical format that is clearly reminiscent of Scottish graphics. The reductive, geometric figures are highly structured; the only curves in their bodies are formed by simple circular and teardrop shapes. The vertical bands that make up their bodies echo the overall shape of the poster. Moser used colors in a similarly subdued fashion, dominated by a flat red and blue that are outlined by hardedged contour lines. The text is used in the Scottish manner as a plinth for the figures, yet it is better integrated with them by passages of ornament that allow text and image to flow together. In contrast to all of this geometric clarity is the fanciful lettering, which features scarcely legible abstract forms. Some of the letters bulge, some serve as passive foils to the more exuberant letters, while the "R"s in "Osterreichs" (fourth line from the bottom) look like deformed "A"s. While replete with curved elements, especially the stems, the curves are not irregular, like the French Art Nouveau, but rather seem to be geometric in their baseline shapes. These dramatic letters are justified, forming a crisp block that belies their exaggerated forms. The geometric pattern and extreme simplification of the figures in this poster are distinctly un-sexual and un-Symbolist, a far cry from the decorative sensuality of Klimt's spiral floral designs, such as the one in Nuda Veritas.

Another poster that bridges the curvilinear style of the early Secession with the post-1900 concern with geometry was made by Alfred Roller in 1903 for the sixteenth Secession exhibition (fig. 2.15). At the top of the lithograph, the three "S"s in the word "Secession" display short, blunt curves that descend into long sin­uous spines, elongated and stylized like the traditional allegorical figure. The field behind them is made up not of lavish floral orna­ment, but of a reductive geometric pattern. The plinth-like block of text at the bottom features an incredibly dense, bold decorative type, in which the letters expand to fit into every nook and cranny of the box that circumscribes them.
 

2.11 Josef Olbrich, Secession, 1898. Poster. Lithograph.
MAK-Austrian Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art, Vienna.

Koloman Moser. Posters.

2.15 Alfred Roller, Secession 16 Ausstellung, 1903.
Poster Color lithograph. V&A Picture Library,
Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

Wiener Werkstatte

Around 1903, Josef Hoffmann (1870-1956), the Viennese architect, designer, and member of the Secession, and Koloman Moser began to develop a new organization that would focus its efforts on promoting high standards of manufacture for Austrian crafts. (The term "crafts" in the early twentieth century denotes the decorative arts associated with architecture such as furniture and textile design, metalwork, as well as bookbinding, graphic design and even the creation of industrial products, and should not be confused with the uniquely American notion of "crafts" as amateurish art projects with ephemeral materials, such as collages made by children.) With the financial support of the industrialist Fritz Warndorfer, they named their organization the Wiener Werkstatte, translatable as the "Viennese Workshops."

Hoffmann and Moser, who were both professors at Vienna's Kunstgcwerbeschule, or "School of Crafts," wrote in the 1905 manifesto of the Wiener Werkstatte: "So long as our cities, our houses, our rooms, our furniture, our effects, our clothes and our jewelry, so long as our language and feelings fail to reflect the spirit of our times in a plain, simple and beautiful way, we shall be infinitely behind our ancestors." The artists of the Wiener Werkstatte, influenced by William Morris and the principles of the Arts and Crafts movement, as well as by the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, sought to create works in a variety of media that would beautify modern urban society. Between 1903 and 1905, a schism gradually deepened between artists committed to the collapse of the traditional arts and crafts hierarchy, and those who felt that painting was the most exalted form of art produced at the Secession. (The painter Gustav Klimt was, in fact, pan of the former group, devoted to the ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerkj) This led to a gradual decline in the cohesiveness of the Secession movement and, after 1905, it was eclipsed by former Secession artists' new commitment to the Werkstatte. While a number of Secession artists had earlier desired to pursue the production of crafts, they had never successfully formed relationships with manufacturers, and so the Werkstatte grew out of the Secession movement's commitment to crafts.

Werkstatte Style

In terms of style, the artists associated with the Werkstatte rejected the irregular, organic curvilinear style of the early Secession and focused their efforts on the geometric clarity of form that had become a major part of Secessionstil around 1900. All of the products of the Werkstatte were harmonized to fit this restrained style, a style that was in a way summarized by the two logotypes produced to adorn its goods in 1903 (fig.2.16). In tune with the medieval spirit of collaboration that had characterized the Arts and Crafts movement in England, it was never revealed whether Moser or Hoffmann had designed the logos or if they were a communal project. The "rose" logo features the eponymous flower depicted in a severe rectilinear design, its bloom made up of squares within squares, each part of the flower boxed in by a rectangle. The "Twin Ws" logo displays the superimposed letters in a perfectly square shape, essentially an em box around the letters. An important part of the Werkstatte ideology was that the designers, most of whom were graduates of the Kunstgewerbeschule, would be paid royalties from their work, and not have to suffer the lowly status and desperate poverty of wage laborers.

The square shape that is a distinguishing characteristic of many Werkstatte designs was employed equally by Moser and Hoffmann, although the latter used it so prominently that it became known by the nickname the "Quadratl-Hoffmann." For example, in 1905, Hoffmann designed a poster for the Werkstatte that regularly intersperses the "Twin Ws" logo with the words "Wiener Werkstatte" centered and justified into a square block of text (fig. 2.17). Here, the use of orthogonal schemes to advertise the elegant functionalism of Werkstatte products is in resounding contrast to the idiosyncratic designs of the Secession—designs that had effectively signified the Secession artists' interest in Symbolism and mysticism.

 

In 1904, Hoffmann designed a set of geometrically stylized cutlery for the patron Fritz Warndorfer (fig. 2.18). This flatware was monogrammed in the same manner as the Werkstatte's "Twin Ws" logotype, with boxes circumscribing geometrically shaped letters that have no stresses. The flatware itself was composed of the same type of pure geometric shapes and formal clarity. This place setting was featured along with other tableware at a 1906 exhibition called "The Laid Table," which was held at the Werkstatte's headquarters. It will be important to be able to distinguish between the Werkstatte's rectilinear designs, which have a stylish geometry to them, as evidenced by the sleek shapes and elongated proportions of the fork in this example, and later geometric styles, which are often drier and less decorative in their visual effects. The geometric linear elements in Werkstatte products are essentially decorative, akin to the sinuous lines of Art Nouveau. Just as the curvilinear flourishes of Art Nouveau posters sometimes obscured the legibility of the text, often the stylized geometry of Werkstatte products inhibited their function­ality. Without having sampled food with this museum-quality flatware, it would be hard to evaluate this example.

Hoffmann and Moser designed the interior of the fashion house owned by Emilie Floge (1862-1918), an important patron and longtime companion of Klimt. The Schwestern Floge opened in 1904, sporting an interior with a simple orthogonal design. Hoffman contributed the table and chair set seen in this photo­graph (fig. 2.19). The spare, rectilinear simplicity of the chairs, with a strong vertical emphasis, is complemented by the boxy shape of the cubic table. The elongated chairback is reminiscent of Mackintosh's Argyle Chair, which had been a pan of the Scottish Room at the eighth Secession exhibition of 1900, around the time that Hoffmann shifted his style from one of florid organic forms to this more rectilinear approach. The slight curves in the table's base are positively exuberant by the restrained standards of the Werkstatte. Klimt, in turn, designed a number of textiles for the Werkstatte as well as fashion designs for Floge. Owing partly to its financial success in designing textiles, the Werkstatte opened branches in Zurich, Switzerland, and New York City as well as a new headquarters in a fashionable district of Vienna in 1907.

   The Werkstatte artists organized two large-scale exhibitions of their work in the summers of 1908 and 1909, which they called simply "Kunstschau Wien" ("art show in Vienna"). The shows were held in a temporary building designed by Hoffmann. With fifty-four rooms coetaining the work of over 170 artists, the exhibition presented a wide range of Austrian art, not just that produced at the Werkstatte. However, one of its most notable rooms was devoted to Klimt, another to the products of the Werkstatte itself

A poster publicizing the show by Berthold Loffler (1874-1960), a professor at the Kunstgewerbeschulc and a member of the Werkstatte, features the typical allegorical figure of the arts (fig. 2.21). However, in keeping with the tenets of the Werkstatte style, the figure is highly schematic, smooth and sleek in appearance. Her body is punctuated by a handful of symmetrical crosses, each with its corners filled in by black circles. It is important to remember the ongoing influence of Japonisme in Europe, specifically in the flat areas of color bounded by heavy black contour lines in this poster. Loftier also organized a room at the Kunstschau that was dedicated solely to the art of the advertising poster. A myriad posters featuring rectilinear designs and geometric patterns can be viewed in the photograph. Loffler's show represented the first formal exhibition of the poster to take place in Vienna.

   Another type of graphic design widely practiced at the Werkstatte was the creation of postcards; more than a thousand unique postcard designs were printed at the workshop. Because of the inexpensive nature of their production, postcards allowed artists to experiment with a wide range of design styles. For example, a lithographed card designed by Rudolph Kalvach (1883-1932) to celebrate a "name day" is awash with a vivid juxtaposition of the complementary colors blue and orange (fig. 2.20). While the reductive drawing and symmetry of the card resonate with the overall Werkstatte style, the ornamental line around the lettering is rather whimsical and idiosyncratic in a manner that is not typical of the workshop. Many of the stems of the letters in the greeting wobble a bit and feature changes in stress, a hint of the Secesswnstil that contrasts with the firmer geometry and even line of the "Twin Ws" in the lower left.

   In book design, the Werkstatte artists displayed a penchant for fine materials much like that of the Kelmscott Press in England. The leather cover of the writing case shown here {fig. 2.22) features the same sort of geometric repetition that Hoffmann had used in the poster discussed above (see fig. 2.17). The dense, rhythmic pattern was designed by Mathilde Flogl (1893-1950). As had been the case with the Kelmscott Press and the broader Arts and Crafts movement in England under Morris, the espoused ideal of making the entire world of mass-produced goods beautiful was fine in theory, but the practice at the Werkstatte was dedicated almost exclusively to the creation of handmade goods such as this for the wealthy bourgeoisie. Other than a few postcards, broadsheets, and children's books, the prod­ucts of the Werkstatte were accessible only to the moneyed elite. Moser left the Werkstatte in 1907 to pursue a career as a painter. The iconic geometric style that had dominated the organization since 1903 gave way around 1915 to a more eclectic variety of design languages, united only in their continuing goal of beautifying craft production. Hoffmann remained a part of the organization he had co-founded until its dissolution in 1932.

2.22 Josef Hoffmann, Writing Case, 1927-29. Pattern design by Mathilde Flogl.
Manufactured by the Wiener Werkstatte. Leather, gilt-stamped,
MAK-Austrian Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art, Vienna.

see also:

Oskar Kokoschka

Egon Schiele

Austrian Expressionism: Oskar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele

Another trend in graphic design that grew out of the Viennese Secession movement was Expressionism. Expressionism is nei­ther a defined movement like the Werkstatte, nor is it a unitary style. Instead, it is a mindset whereby the artist seeks not to show what the world looks like, but rather how it feels. Along these lines, many Expressionist artists sought to represent the storm and stress of a tortured soul or a trying situation. Not all Expressionism has a specific, directed feeling in mind; often it articulates a type of generalized anxiety or unease about the world. While Expressionist artists in Vienna were associated with the Werkstatte, their styles stand in stark contrast to the Werkstatte style of geometric clarity and compositional simplicity. In its place, they use distortions of form, color, and space that are designed to increase the emotional impact on the viewer. Viennese Expressionist style has much in common with the expressive power of French Symbolist an as well as Art Nouveau. The art historian Peter Selz recognized this consonance but also elucidated an important distinction, "Symbolism, Art Nouveau, and expressionism share above all their emphasis on form and its evocative potentialities, ... Frequently, where symbolism merely suggests and understates, Expressionism exaggerates and over­states." Furthermore, Expressionists eschew the polished finish and ornamental elegance of Symbolism and Art Nouveau. The foremost Expressionist artists associated with the Werkstatte, Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980) and Egon Schiele (1890-1918), were both proteges of Gustav Klimt. While Schiele and Kokoschka specialized in painting, they also produced a number of striking posters and other graphics. As a student at the Kunstgewerbeschule, Kokoschka had produced bookbindings and illustrations as well as ceramics for the Werkstatte as early as 1907, some of which were included in the 1908 Kunstschau. Kokoschka also designed a poster, The Cotton Picker, publicizing the exhibition (fig. 2.23). Certain aspects of the poster show the influence of the Secessionstil, particularly the format of a single woman amid an ornamental plant motif. However, nothing about the figure or the cotton displays the decorative fluidity of Art Nouveau. The figure looks rather awkward and disjointed, with an elongated arm hanging at her side that is anything but graceful; her hair seems detached from her head and face; the bold colors of the figure's clothes lack a harmonious sense of bal­ance. Next to the figure, the linear element of the cotton plant appears "clumsily" proportioned and lacks a firm hand. These are all qualities that Kokoschka put into the drawing on purpose in order to increase its expressive power. The chunky proportions of the scarcely legible lettering complement the ungainly shapes in the image portion of the poster. All of the sensuality that Klimt and others put into this type of image has been drained out of The Cotton Picker. The subject itself, a worker in a field, is as unsexy as they come, a far cry from the vivid sensuality of Nuda Veritas.

   Kokoschka takes expressive intensity to a new level with the self-portrait he painted in 1910, which was reproduced as a lithographic poster for Der Sturm, a Berlin art journal dedicated to the Expressionist cause (fig. 2.24). Kokoschka had shaved his own head that year and reveled in his striking appearance, while also displaying for all to see his almost religious commitment to Expressionist art. Of course, in the poster he has exaggerated the shapes of his features in order to emphasize a sort of misshapen ugliness that exudes emotional intensity, like that of a biblical prophet. The religious motif is continued in his pose, as Kokoschka presents himself in the guise of Jesus, poking at a wound in his chest. He attempted to unify the image and text by placing both his initials, "OK," and the words "Ncue Nummer" "new issue") on his body itself, like a slogan carved into his chest. Like many Expressionist works, this self-portrait is emotionally raw, reveling in the power of human feeling.

Like that of Kokoschka, Egon Schiele's torturous emotional life is well represented in the art he produced. Schiele had a traditional art education, having studied at both the Kunstgewerbeschule and the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. When Schiele was a child, his father degenerated into insanity as a result of a syphilis infection, and Schiele's difficult youth caused him to come into almost constant conflict with authority. Schiele was obsessed with the depiction of sexuality and psychosexual conflict, often mixed together with morbid fantasies of death and decay. He was, of course, a great devotee of Freud's work in this area. Schiele's explicit images of adolescents (the age of sexual consent in Vienna at this time was fourteen) made him notorious, and he was briefly imprisoned in 1912 under an obscenity statute.

The commemorative poster shown here was issued in support of a music festival held in 1912 as a celebration of Austrian com­posers (fig. 2.26). Like Kokoschka in his poster for Der Sturm, Schiele used a self-portrait as his Expressionist vehicle. The self-portrait was in many ways the natural subject of these two artists, because their art tends to look inward, at their own minds, as opposed to documenting the outer world. Schiele has distorted his own face into a terrible grimace that is complemented by the blood red color. There is no direct correlation between the image and the traditional event that it promotes, suggesting the widespread acceptance of the Expressionist idiom as signifying "culture" in its broadest sense.

In 1915, Schiele was granted the first solo exhibition of his paintings and drawings in Vienna, at the Galerie Arnot (fig. 2.27). He designed this poster to publicize the show. Displaying his ongoing propensity for narcissism as well as religious imagery, Schiele represented himself pierced by arrows, like the Christian saint Sebastian. While the elongated proportions of the figure have their roots in the An Nouveau style, here they form part of a disjointed body, an assemblage of distorted parts that do not seem to fit together. This damaged body torn apart by arrows says more about Schiele's internal psychological state than about the actual condition of his corpus. While the image depicts Schiele himself, the viewer is not expected to empathize with the specific facts of his suffering so much as to feel this powerful vision of emotional pain.

     The forty-ninth exhibition of the Vienna Secession was held in 1918, even though the organization's best years were behind it. Schiele contributed a number of works, including a poster (fig. 2.25) in which he returned again to religious imagery, which he had so often delved into in the past, in this case the Last Supper. The table has a jagged, angular shape, and the figures seem iso­lated from one another, two elements that heighten the expressive-punch of the work. The text box looks as if it was layered over the image haphazardly, cutting off part of the scene, a compositional technique that suggests a chaotic element in the design. In 1918, the work that Schiele displayed at the Secession exhibition met with considerable acclaim. Three years earlier, Schiele had married Edith Harms (1894-1918), a young woman who lived with her family across the street from the artist, so it appeared that both his personal and professional lives were now finally in place. Tragically, in October 1918 Schiele and his wife, now pregnant, both succumbed to the Spanish influenza that killed many millions of Europeans. Klimt and Moser also died that year, while Kokoschka had long ago settled elsewhere, and an era of Viennese art came to an end.

2.25 Egon Schiele, Secession 49 Ausstellung, 1918. Poster.

MAK-Austrian Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art, Vienna.
 

2.26 Egon Schtele, Musik Festival (Music Festival), 1912  Poster.
MAK-Austnan Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art, Vienna.

2.27 Egon Schiele, Galerie Arnot, 1915. Wien Museum, Berlin.