Indeed, there is no guidebook to the Secession. During the reign of Franz Joseph I (1830-1916), ruler of the multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire, Hevesi worked especially for the Secession as columnist and art critic.
#Vienna secession book cover professional
He began his professional career in a Hungarian daily newspaper when he was 24-years-old and was shortly after promoted to report for the arts and culture section of the Viennese Fremdenblatt. Ludwig Hevesi (1842-1910), born under the name Ludwig Hirsch in the Austro-Hungarian town of Heves, was a journalist and writer. To list every of Bahr’s accomplishments would go far beyond the scope of this preface. Beyond his collection of critical essays and his activities as playwright of comedies, he also composed several works of prose and drama.
In 1922, he returned to Germany to settle down in Munich, where he died twelve years later. After two decades in Berlin, he left Germany for Austria to work in Salzburg and Vienna. He lived for over twenty years in Berlin, where he mainly worked with theatre manager, director, and actor Max Reinhardt (1873-1943). Furthermore, he was a spokesman for Jung-Wien (Young Vienna), a group of writers and literary critics, who called themselves Viennese coffeehouse writers and used Die Zeit, a weekly literary magazine owned and published by Hermann Bahr between 18, as a mouthpiece for their ideas. The Austrian Hermann Bahr, born 1863 in Linz, was a poet, outstanding essayist, influential art critic, and expert of contemporary literary movements from naturalism to expressionism, as well as one of the most important comedy authors of his time. The two experts in question are Hermann Bahr and Ludwig Hevesi. Excerpts from their commentaries have been carefully translated from the variety of German that was used before the Second Orthographical Conference in 1902. For this reason, this book will feature the writing of two contemporaries of the Secession artists, both believable and competent columnists whose testimonies are as relevant today as they were in the early 20th century. To write a text on the Viennese Secession – an art movement that, despite its short creative period of barely ten years, had an enormous impact in the development of modern art – without consulting the contemporary witnesses of that period would be a futile venture. Painting, sculpture, and architecture are addressed by the authors and highlight the diversity and richness of a movement whose motto proclaimed “for each time its art, for each art its liberty” – a declaration to the innovation and originality of this revolutionary art movement. Turning away from an established art and immersing themselves in organic, voluptuous, and decorative shapes, these artists opened themselves to an evocative, erotic aesthetic that blatantly offended the bourgeoisie of the time.
Defining itself as a “total art”, without any political or commercial constraint, the Viennese Secession represented the ideological turmoil that affected craftsmen, architects, graphic artists, and designers from this period. Influenced by Art Nouveau, this movement (created in 1897 by Gustav Klimt, Carl Moll, and Josef Hoffmann) was not an anonymous artistic revolution. A symbol of modernity, the Viennese Secession was defined by the rebellion of twenty artists who were against the conservative Vienna Künstlerhaus' oppressive influence over the city, the epoch, and the whole Austro-Hungarian Empire.
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