Vienna 1900 / The Viennese Style
The formal and stylistic modernism of the Secession, the School of Arts and Crafts, and the Wiener Werkstätte stands in stark contrast to Adolf Loos’s cultural modernism. For Loos, modernism is a question of attitude, not of style or ornamentation developed by artists. He rejects the combination of art and function in everyday objects as culturally barren, with the exception of Otto Wagner, whom he credits with having achieved the artistic realization of function. In doing so, he opposes the Secessionists’ belief, inspired by the English Arts and Crafts movement, that beauty can improve everyday life.
Since 1897, the Secessionists had been striving for a specifically Austrian, or rather Viennese, style based on Moser’s Japanese-influenced surface art, the classicist heritage of the Biedermeier period, and local folk art. First exhibited in 1900, it was disseminated through Hoffmann’s and Moser’s teaching activities at the School of Arts and Crafts.
Between 1900 and the First World War, the Vienna Arts and Crafts movement developed rapidly: from geometric-abstract beginnings to a classicist phase characterized by vegetal ornamentation from 1906/07 onwards, to the Rococo-influenced, atectonic designs of Dagobert Peche. Peche questioned the Secession’s ideal of unity and called for the overcoming of mere functionalism. From 1910 onwards, a new generation of architects (including Josef Frank, Oskar Wlach, and Oskar Strnad) emerged who took social change into account and critically assessed the Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art.
