Schiele and the Vienna Secession: Vienna's radical art movements explained

Why Vienna 1897–1918 matters in art history

The period between the founding of the Vienna Secession in 1897 and the deaths of Klimt and Schiele in 1918 was one of the most consequential two decades in European art history. In a city of two million people, a small number of artists produced work that challenged the relationship between art and life, between representation and psychological truth, between decorative beauty and uncomfortable honesty — and did so with technical mastery that remains extraordinary by any subsequent standard.

This guide explains who the key figures were, what they made, and where to see their work in Vienna.

The Vienna Secession: context and founding

By 1897, Vienna’s main artists’ organization — the Künstlerhaus — was controlled by a conservative establishment that prioritised historical painting and commercial success over artistic innovation. The situation was not unique to Vienna; similar conflicts produced the Munich Secession (1892) and the Berlin Secession (1898).

In Vienna, the break was led by Gustav Klimt, then 35, who had established himself as the leading academic mural painter in Austria. Along with 18 other artists — including Josef Hoffmann, Koloman Moser, Carl Moll, and Joseph Maria Olbrich — Klimt resigned from the Künstlerhaus and co-founded the Vereinigung Bildender Künstler Österreichs (Association of Austrian Visual Artists), informally known as the Vienna Secession.

The Secession’s governing principles:

• No jury selection — artists chose their own work for exhibition
• Total environment — exhibitions designed as Gesamtkunstwerke (total artworks)
• International scope — exchange of exhibitions with art movements across Europe
• Dissolution of boundaries between fine art and applied design

The Secession building on Friedrichstraße, designed by Olbrich in 1897–98, embodied these principles architecturally: white cube exterior with the golden dome, inside exhibition spaces that could be completely reconfigured for each show.

The key artists

Gustav Klimt (1862–1918)

The founder and philosophical centre of the Secession. Klimt’s development moved from academic historical painting (the Kunsthistorisches Museum ceiling work, 1890–91) through Symbolism (Judith, Pallas Athena, 1898–1901) to the mature golden style that reached its apex with The Kiss (1907–08) and the Faculty Paintings commissioned for the University of Vienna (since destroyed, known from photographs).

His signature technique — combining oil paint with gold leaf, the flattening of pictorial space into decorative surface, the contrast between explicitly rendered faces and hands against abstracted, patterned clothing — represents the synthesis of Japanese influence, Symbolist content, and Viennese decorative tradition.

After 1910, his work moved away from gold toward earthier tones and more psychological figuration, as seen in Death and Life (at the Leopold Museum).

Egon Schiele (1890–1918)

Schiele met Klimt around 1907, when Klimt was 45 and Schiele was 17. Klimt introduced him to contemporary European art, secured him models, and later arranged for collectors. But Schiele’s development as an artist was rapidly independent of his mentor.

Where Klimt used the decorative surface to create aesthetic distance, Schiele collapsed it: his figures are angular, physically confrontational, rendered with a rawness that makes the viewer uncomfortably aware of the body’s vulnerability. His self-portraits — which form the spine of his mature work — investigate physical self-awareness with an intensity that has no real precedent in European painting before him.

Schiele was arrested in 1912 and spent 24 days in prison for exhibiting erotic drawings where minors could see them. The experience affected him profoundly and is documented in drawings made in his cell that are among the most psychologically acute self-representations in his entire career.

He died on 31 October 1918, three days after his pregnant wife Edith, of Spanish flu. He was 28. The work he produced in his eight productive years (1910–1918) includes approximately 330 oil paintings and thousands of drawings and watercolours.

Josef Hoffmann and the Wiener Werkstätte

Josef Hoffmann (1870–1956) was the most consequential designer of the Vienna Secession and one of the founders of the Wiener Werkstätte in 1903. His work extended Secessionist principles into furniture, metalwork, ceramics, and graphic design — the idea that everything surrounding daily life could be made with the same intentionality as fine art.

The Palais Stoclet in Brussels (1905–11, designed by Hoffmann for the Belgian industrialist Adolphe Stoclet) is the masterpiece of Jugendstil domestic design: Klimt contributed the dining room frieze, Hoffmann designed everything else, and the result is the closest thing to a realized Gesamtkunstwerk in the movement’s history.

Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980)

Kokoschka was the third significant figure of early Austrian Expressionism. His early work (the poster for the 1908 Kunstschau exhibition, the illustrated poem “Die träumenden Knaben”) pushed Jugendstil toward a rawer psychological expressionism. His portrait series from 1909–1914 — including the famous portrait of Adolf Loos — is among the most penetrating psychological portraiture of the 20th century.

Kokoschka survived both world wars and lived until 1980. His work is in the Leopold Museum and the Albertina.

Where to see the work in Vienna

Vienna Secession building: The Beethoven Frieze (1902) by Klimt is in the basement — 34 metres of allegorical painting that is the largest original Klimt work you can see at close range. The building also runs a programme of contemporary exhibitions in its upper galleries. Admission approximately €10.

Leopold Museum: World’s largest Schiele collection (220 works), significant Klimt (Death and Life, The Virgin), and substantial Wiener Werkstätte applied arts. See our Leopold Museum guide.

Upper Belvedere: Klimt’s The Kiss and Judith, Schiele’s Death and the Maiden, and a substantial collection of Waldmüller and 19th-century Austrian painting that contextualizes the Secession’s break with tradition.

Albertina: World’s largest collection of Klimt drawings and works on paper; significant Schiele drawings and prints. See our Albertina Museum guide.

Wien Museum (Karlsplatz): Recently renovated, the Wien Museum holds Klimt’s early paintings and significant Schiele and Kokoschka works in the context of Viennese social history.

The Otto Wagner architecture connection

The Vienna Secession’s aesthetic transformed not just the art world but the built environment. Otto Wagner (1841–1918) — the dominant Austrian architect of the era — moved from Historicism to a Jugendstil-influenced modernism in the 1890s and beyond. His Vienna Stadtbahn pavilions at Karlsplatz (1894–99) — small Jugendstil structures with white marble facades and golden sunflower ornaments — are the most publicly visible examples of this architectural transformation. They are free to view from the outside and one pavilion is open as a café.

Frequently asked questions about Schiele and the Vienna Secession

What is the Vienna Secession?

An artist’s association founded in 1897 by Klimt and 18 others, breaking from the Künstlerhaus to establish an independent exhibition space for modern art. Their building on Friedrichstraße, with the golden dome, still operates and houses Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze.

What is Jugendstil?

The German-language term for Art Nouveau — the decorative arts movement of the 1890s–1910s that sought to dissolve boundaries between fine art and applied design. In Vienna, it manifested through the Secession and the Wiener Werkstätte.

Where can I see Schiele’s work in Vienna?

The Leopold Museum (220 works — world’s largest collection), Upper Belvedere (Death and the Maiden), and Albertina (drawings).

Is the Vienna Secession building worth visiting?

Yes — especially to see Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze in the basement. Admission approximately €10.

Was Egon Schiele arrested?

Yes — in April 1912 on charges related to exhibiting erotic drawings where minors could see them. He served 24 days in prison.

What is the Wiener Werkstätte?

A production community of visual artists founded by Hoffmann and Moser in 1903, producing furniture, metalwork, ceramics, and textiles in a Jugendstil style. Operated until 1932.

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