Secession Building

The Secession holds no permanent collection of its own beyond the Beethoven Frieze, which the Oesterreichische Galerie Belvedere owns and lends permanently. Everything else in the building is a changing loan exhibition chosen by the association's own artist members, several times a year, so what is on the walls beyond the frieze depends entirely on when a visit happens to fall.

In April 1897 a group of Vienna's own painters, sculptors and architects resigned from the Kuenstlerhaus, the city's official artists association, in protest at its taste for the historicist styles that lined the Ringstrasse. They called themselves the Association of Visual Artists Vienna Secession and elected Gustav Klimt their first president. Within a year the new group had a building of its own, on a plot of city land the Vienna council donated at the edge of the Naschmarkt on Friedrichstrasse.

Money came from the group's first exhibition and from the industrialist Karl Wittgenstein, father of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who covered much of the construction cost. The design went to Joseph Maria Olbrich, then twenty-nine years old and still an assistant in Otto Wagner's office. The foundation stone was laid on 28 April 1898 and the building was finished on 29 October the same year, six months from first stone to last.

What went up was not a monument in the Ringstrasse manner but a working exhibition hall, planned around a cross of rectangular rooms set about a central square space and lit from above through four large glass skylights rather than from windows in the walls. At roughly 1,000 square meters it is a small building. It was built to show pictures well, cheaply and fast, and it has done that job, with interruptions, for more than a century.

Olbrich and his collaborators treated the building's outside as a manifesto rather than decoration. Above the entrance, in gilt lettering, runs the sentence the Secession still uses to describe itself: Der Zeit ihre Kunst, der Kunst ihre Freiheit, to every age its art, to every art its freedom. Below the motto, three carved gorgon heads flanked by owls look out over the street, a design by Koloman Moser reading Athena, goddess of wisdom and patron of the arts, into a building whose founders believed they were fighting a real fight against the artistic establishment they had just left.

On the building's side wall, cut into the render and picked out in gold, is a second inscription: Ver Sacrum, sacred spring, the name the Secession gave its own art journal and, by extension, to the movement itself. Laurel appears everywhere on the facade, stylised into the flattened, almost vegetal ornament typical of Viennese Jugendstil, its usual meaning of victory carried lightly rather than declared outright.

The single most extravagant element sits on the roof: an open iron sphere 8.5 meters across, carrying about 2,500 gilded metal laurel leaves and 311 berries, more a piece of jewellery scaled up to building size than a conventional dome. Vienna's conservative architectural establishment mocked it from the day it opened in 1898, alongside the rest of Olbrich's stark, columnless design, and coined a nickname that has stuck for well over a century: the goldenes Krauthappel, the golden cabbage, after the market produce sold a few steps away at the Naschmarkt. The insult turned into affection long ago; nobody in Vienna today calls the dome anything else.

The dome remains valuable enough to attract thieves. On the night of 23 to 24 April 2018, someone climbed the building's maintenance scaffolding and broke six to eight gilded leaves off the sphere, causing roughly 10,000 euros of damage to recover leaves worth about 1,000 euros each. The building's most recent full re-gilding was carried out as part of the 2017-18 renovation, which also opened barrier-free access down to the Beethoven Frieze room.

Klimt painted the Beethoven Frieze directly onto the walls of the main hall for the Secession's Fourteenth Exhibition in 1902, a show built around Max Klinger's polychrome statue of Beethoven and staged to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the composer's death. The frieze, over 34 meters long and about 2 meters high, was never meant to survive the exhibition: Klimt worked in charcoal, casein paint, gold and silver leaf, gilt stucco, mother-of-pearl buttons, mirror glass and semi-precious stones applied straight onto light lath-and-plaster walls built to come down once the show closed.

It did not come down. The collector Carl Reininghaus bought it in 1903 specifically to keep it from being destroyed, trading Klimt more than a hundred preparatory drawings for the right to do so. In 1915 the frieze and many of the studies passed to the Viennese industrialist August Lederer and his wife Serena, major patrons of Klimt and of the Secession generation. After Austria's annexation by Nazi Germany in 1938, Serena Lederer, who was Jewish, was forced from her home and her collection seized; the frieze was recovered by Allied forces from the Altaussee salt mine in 1945 and returned to her son, Erich Lederer, then living in exile in Geneva.

Austria refused Lederer an export permit for the frieze, and in 1972 he sold it to the Austrian state for 750,000 dollars, well under what it could have brought on the open market with an export licence attached. In 2013 Lederer's heirs petitioned Austria's Advisory Board for Restitution, arguing the 1972 sale had been made under duress created by the state's own export policy. The board rejected the claim in March 2015, finding no direct link between the wartime persecution of the family and the terms of the later sale. The frieze itself had by then spent nearly a decade in restoration, led by Manfred Koller of the Federal Monuments Office, before a climate-controlled room was built for it in the building's basement in 1985. The Oesterreichische Galerie Belvedere, which owns the frieze, placed it on permanent loan to the Secession in 1986, back in the building it was made for.

The building did not survive the Second World War untouched. Allied bombing damaged the structure, and in the final days of the war in 1945 retreating German forces set part of it on fire. Reconstruction in 1963 restored the original decorative scheme where it had been lost and added a new gallery. A far more thorough renovation followed in 1984-85 under the architect Adolf Krischanitz, who modernised the exhibition infrastructure while keeping the building's original layout and proportions intact; it was this renovation that created the dedicated basement room for the Beethoven Frieze. A third campaign in 2017-18 re-gilded the dome and opened barrier-free access down to the frieze room.

What makes the Secession unusual among Vienna's major exhibition venues is who runs it. It remains an artist-run association, as it was in 1897, with a rotating group of Secession members deciding the programme rather than a state museum administration or an outside curator. The main hall, the smaller Grafisches Kabinett upstairs and the three-room gallery in the basement change hands several times a year, mostly for solo and group shows of living artists; the Beethoven Frieze room is the one constant.

Visitors and critics both tend to treat the building and the frieze as the reason to come, and the contemporary programme as the more uneven part of the visit; some reviewers find real substance in it, others find it the least rewarding part of the building. Both readings sit on the same ticket, which is close to the position the Secession's founders wanted for themselves: judged on the work on the walls that season, not on the reputation of the building around it.

Visitors and critics agree on what carries a visit: the building itself and the Beethoven Frieze in its basement room. Opinion splits hardest over the changing contemporary exhibitions that fill the rest of the building, which some find as rewarding as the permanent holdings and others find add little beyond the frieze.