Vienna 1900: How Klimt, Schiele, and Mucha Built the Last Great City for Art

Zocine Art
May 30
5 min read

Updated: Jun 17

Between 1897 and 1918, the city of Vienna produced more world-shaping art and ideas than any single European city had produced in any twenty-one-year period since Renaissance Florence. The painter Gustav Klimt founded the Secession in 1897 — a breakaway exhibition society that rejected the conservative Vienna Künstlerhaus and declared a new union of painting, architecture, design, and craft. By 1908 Egon Schiele was painting his first major Expressionist canvases. In Prague, Alphonse Mucha was inventing what Paris would call Art Nouveau. Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams in 1899, four blocks from Klimt's studio.

This guide explains who the major Vienna 1900 artists were, what they did, and where to start reading them today. Three painters anchor the movement: Klimt (the founder), Schiele (the heir), Mucha (the parallel Art Nouveau twin in Prague). Each broke with the academy. Each is now central to the visual vocabulary of modern decorative art.

What 'Vienna Secession' actually means

The Vienna Secession (Wiener Secession) was a formal artists' society founded in April 1897. Three principles separated it from the conservative Vienna art establishment:

Total art (Gesamtkunstwerk). The Secession dissolved the boundary between painting, sculpture, architecture, applied design, and craft. A Secession exhibition would include a Klimt portrait, a Hoffmann silver tea service, an Olbrich-designed exhibition hall, and a Roller theatre poster — all in one room, all priced equally, all signed.
Open to international art. The Secession brought Whistler, Rodin, Klinger, and the Glasgow School to Vienna. The Künstlerhaus had refused to exhibit foreign artists for decades; the Secession exhibited them in its first season.
New decoration over imitation. The Secession declared that decorative pattern, gold leaf, mosaic, and ornament were equal in dignity to figurative oil painting. This was the foundational claim. It changed European visual culture for the next fifty years.

Klimt — the founder and the gold

Gustav Klimt (1862–1918) painted his first major Secession works between 1898 and 1908. The 'Golden Period' canvases — Judith I (1901), Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907), The Kiss (1908) — apply hammered gold and silver leaf directly to the canvas alongside oil paint, dissolving the boundary between painting and Byzantine mosaic. Klimt had studied the gold mosaics at Ravenna and Venice; he carried that vocabulary into modern Vienna. His subject was usually the female figure, but the figures dissolve into pattern — robes become fields of ornament, backgrounds become gold ground, faces float free of bodies. Klimt designed the Beethoven Frieze (1902) for the 14th Secession exhibition; it remains one of the canonical works of Vienna 1900.

Schiele — the heir and the line

Egon Schiele (1890–1918) was Klimt's protégé. He arrived in Vienna at sixteen, met Klimt at the Kunstgewerbeschule, and absorbed everything Klimt had to teach about pattern and the female figure — then stripped it back to bone. Schiele's painting is the opposite of Klimt's surface: nothing is decorated, everything is exposed. The body is angular, the line is razor-thin, the colour is raw umber and acid green and oxblood. Where Klimt covered the figure in gold, Schiele stripped it bare. Schiele died in October 1918, three days after his wife Edith, both in the Spanish flu pandemic. He was 28.

Mucha — the parallel in Prague

Alphonse Mucha (1860–1939) was Czech, working primarily in Paris between 1894 and 1910. He is not strictly a Vienna Secession artist — he never showed at the Secession — but the visual language he invented in Paris (decorative panels, women framed by stylised flowers, lithographic posters with calligraphic borders) is so closely related to Klimt's that any reader's guide to Vienna 1900 has to include him. His Job cigarette poster (1896) and his decorative series of the Seasons and the Times of Day are the canon of Art Nouveau. After Czechoslovakia's independence in 1918, Mucha returned to Prague and spent twenty years on the Slav Epic — twenty monumental canvases of Slavic history, painted essentially as nationalist commission.

Why all three matter together

Klimt, Schiele, and Mucha share a single formal commitment: decorative pattern and figurative drawing are not separate disciplines but the same discipline. A figure can be drawn with the precision of an academic life study and the entire field around the figure can be ornamental pattern. This was a heretical claim in 1897 — the Paris Salon and the Vienna Künstlerhaus drew a hard line between fine art (figure) and applied art (ornament). All three artists collapsed the line. Everything in 20th-century graphic design, illustration, and decorative painting that came after — from Beardsley's late drawings to the Bauhaus posters to mid-century commercial illustration — depends on this collapse.

What else came out of Vienna 1900

The Secession was not only a painters' movement. The architect Otto Wagner designed the Secession's exhibition building (still standing on the Friedrichstraße in Vienna, gold dome and all) and the Postsparkasse (1906). Josef Hoffmann founded the Wiener Werkstätte (1903), a design workshop that produced silver, glass, textiles, and furniture in the Secession's flat decorative grammar. Adolf Loos built his Looshaus (1910) on the Michaelerplatz as a radical rejection of Secession ornament — modernist architecture begins with that building. Across the city: Mahler conducting the Vienna Court Opera (1897–1907), Freud publishing the Interpretation of Dreams (1899), Wittgenstein at the Realschule, Schoenberg composing the first atonal works (1908). Vienna 1900 is the densest single decade in modern Western culture.

How to hang Vienna 1900 art in a modern interior

Klimt's golden-period works are full-bleed colour — gold leaf, jewel reds, deep blacks. Hang against deep sage, oxblood, or ink walls; never against pale walls (the gold flattens). Frame in dark walnut or oxidised brass; never gilt (the frame fights the gold of the painting). Schiele wants the opposite: pale plaster walls, matte black thin frames, breathing room — his line work disappears in cluttered rooms. Mucha posters frame beautifully in oxidised brass on cream walls; they work in entryways, powder rooms, narrow halls, or stairwells (anywhere the verticality is given a chance to read). Never hang Klimt and Mucha together on the same wall — the two visual languages compete. Schiele alone, Klimt alone, Mucha alone.

Key takeaways

The Vienna Secession was founded in 1897, with Gustav Klimt as its first president.
Klimt's Golden Period (1898–1908) applied gold leaf to canvas alongside oil paint — collapsing fine art and decorative craft.
Egon Schiele was Klimt's protégé; his work is figurative and skeletal where Klimt's is patterned and gold.
Alphonse Mucha worked in Paris and Prague (parallel to the Secession), inventing the canon of Art Nouveau posters.
Vienna 1900 also produced Otto Wagner, Hoffmann, the Wiener Werkstätte, Mahler, Freud, Schoenberg, and Wittgenstein — the densest decade in modern Western culture.