What is Jugendstil?

Jugendstil (literally "young style" in English) is the German name of the Art Noveau movement, or, perhaps more accurately, the German and Austrian take on the Art Nouveau movement. Artists from this movement took inspiration from figures and motifs found in nature and applied it in almost every art form imaginable. Jugendstil rose to prominence in Austria in 1897 when a group of artists from the Association of Austrian Artists, fed up with the organization's fixation on historicism (think Ringstrasse), left the Association to found the Vienna Secession. The founding artists were Gustav Klimt, Joseph Maria Olbrich, Koloman Moser, Josef Hoffman, and Max Kurzweil. Later additions include Otto Wagner.

The Secessionists exhibited their art in the Wiener Secessionsgebäude (Secession Building) in Vienna's fourth district, itself designed by founding architect Olbrich. The Secessionists contributed in many different ways, hoping to achieve Gesamtkunstwerk, total synthesis of the arts. Klimt and Kurzweil became renowned for their paintings while Hoffman and Moser went on to found the Wiener Werkstätte and Olbrich and Wagner left their mark on Vienna's cityscape with their architecture.

The Wiener Werkstätte was a workshop with facilities for many types of applied arts including woodworking, metalworking, leatherworking, and the manufacturing of textiles, which manifested itself in furniture, housewares, jewelery, garments, and more. The artists of the Werkstätte believed that all people should have access to affordable art of superior craftsmanship. This ultimately didn't turn out to be the case because the pieces were often expensive and time-consuming to produce. With a motto like, "better to work 10 days on one product than to manufacture 10 products in one day," it is easy to see why their products weren't affordable to the general public. The Leopold Museum has a small gallery of Werkstätte pieces.

Apart from the Secession Building, many other examples of Jugendstil architecture can be found across Vienna, my favorite of which is the Karlsplatz Stadtbahn Station, designed by Wagner and Olbrich, a now defunct train station that was used from 1899 to 1981 in favor of the expanding U-Bahn system. Today, the two remaining buildings are home to an exhibition of the nearby Vienna Museum and, the other, a café.

Something left unmentioned in both Parson's text and in class was that Viennese Secession was not a novel idea at the time. In fact, similar movements took place in Munich five years earlier and in Berlin one year later. Not that it diminishes Viennese contributions to fin-de-siècle culture, but Austrian history likes to paint the Viennese Secessionists as revolutionaries that challenged the status quo in ways yet unheard of, failing to mention once, from what I have seen in a number of museums and books on Viennese culture, the fact that they mayvery well have just been following what was fashionable at the time.

Beethoven Frieze, Gustav Klimt in the Secession Building