![]() Eventually these meetings would result in the forming of two informal art societies. Modern-thinking artists in Kunstlerhaus began to meet regularly at either the Café Zum Blauen Freihaus or in the Café Sperl in order to exchange ideas and discuss the work of new artists like Meissonnier and Puvis de Chavannes in France. In this juried selection, it was not uncommon that impressionist and modernist works were rejected in favour of the prevalent naturalism of academic painting. Any established artist at the time belonged to the Kunstlerhaus and each year their work was either selected or rejected for public exhibitions. One of the earliest Ringstrasse buildings, the Kunstlerhaus was designed in the style of an Italian Renaissance villa and it became Vienna’s main exhibition hall often under the presidency of conservative bureaucrats. Two principle institutions dominated the Visual Arts in the years prior to the secession : The Akademie de bildende Kunste (the Academy of fine arts) and the Kunstlerhaus Genessenschaft – a private exhibiting society founded in 1861. It would be the new exhibition hall for the Vienna Secession built by Joseph Olbrich and above it’s door a motto for the age: “To every age its art, to every art its freedom”. Eventually a new building unlike anything ever seen would appear just off the Ringstrasse signalling a rejection of historicism. ![]() It is in this environment that the first seeds of the Secession movement began to germinate, led by a group of artists who searched for a synthesis of the arts and a place where their new works could be exhibited. ![]() There was a Neo-Greek parliament, a gothic City Hall, Neo-Baroque apartment buildings and most importantly only two exhibition bodies favouring classical-style art. ![]() Labelled as a ‘Potemkin City’ in the Secession magazine ‘Ver Sacrum’, the Ringstrasse came to symbolize the stifling attitude towards the arts that predominated in a society content with recycling classical styles rather than embracing the new modernist styles that were budding in the rest of Europe. »Ver Sacrum« reveals the tremendous originality of the Jugendstil language, a cornerstone of modernity that elaborated new forms of design, illustration and print/editorial composition.Take a stroll along the Ringstrasse today the former location of Vienna’s city walls, and one finds a pastiche of 18th century neo-classical architecture built mostly as a showcase for the grandeur of the Habsburg Empire. Writers such as Rainer Maria Rilke, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Maurice Maeterlinck, Knut Hamsun, Otto Julius Bierbaum, Richard Dehmel, Ricarda Huch, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer and Arno Holz were published in its pages. During its six years of activity, 471 original drawings were made specifically for the magazine, along with 55 lithographs and copper engravings and 216 block prints, by artists such as Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Koloman Moser, Otto Wagner, Max Fabiani, Joseph Maria Olbrich and Josef Hoffmann. »Ver Sacrum« (meaning "Sacred Spring" in Latin) was conceived by Gustav Klimt, Max Kurzweil and Ludwig Hevesi. Published for the 120th anniversary of this historic magazine, it reproduces all 120 regular issues―plus some special, limited-edition covers―in 1:1 scale, alongside a selection of block prints, lithographs and copper engravings. This book gathers the covers of Ver Sacrum, the official magazine of the Vienna Secession, which ran from 1898 to 1903. With work by Klimt, Schiele and others, »Ver Sacrum« set the standard for magazine design
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