Jugendstil

In 1994, I took my first trip to Paris and fell in love with something I never would have thought I would have fallen for: Art Nouveau architecture. This flowery, individualistic, nature-based, romantic style (I really dislike using that word...) of design and creation of buildings seemed completely at odds with everything I considered to be sacred and truthful about architecture. That is, rational, ornament-free, minimalist design. Modernism with a capital M. And maybe what came right before it.

That 1994 Paris trip emphasized to me something I already suspected, that in the history of architecture, the period that I am most fascinated with is the late 19th and early 20th century, a time when architects were trying to figure out what new materials and new methods of production (in addition to the re-discovery of reinforced concrete) meant to their expression in the building arts. Art Nouveau didn't fit into my definition of that struggle to come to terms with change brought about by the Industrial Revolution even though it really is in every way, from the timeline to the materials to the unique-ness in breaking from historical precedent. Paris corrected my definition. And Paris of course was right. Paris is always right.

Since 1994, I have tried to cover all the bases Art Nouveau-wise by visiting the cities that I considered to be the hotbeds of this movement. Paris in 1994 was followed by Glasgow in 1997 (and 2007) and Brussels in 2000 and Helsinki in 2002 and Barcelona in 2014. The last place I had on my list was Vienna. After a mis-fire in 2021, 2022 turned out to be the year I made it to Vienna. So Vienna wasn't JUST about the Christmas markets. It was also about Art Nouveau.

One of Otto Wagner's U stations on the Karlsplatz.

In Vienna, Art Nouveau was not called Art Nouveau. In Vienna, Art Nouveau falls under the umbrella of what was regionally (along with artists and architects working in Germany) called Jugendstil. More specifically, in Vienna, it was called the Vienna Secession movement. Is it really that fundamentally different from Art Nouveau in other places? Well...yes and no. Fundamentally different? Not so much. There are shades of grey that make Jugendstil different at least stylistically (there's that word again...) from its Art Nouveau cousins in other places, but at its core Jugendstil places value on nature-based (or perhaps arts and crafts influence) design that bucks traditional stylistic norms while also focusing on the design of not just the building but most of the contents of the building as well. In some cases, right down to the silverware on the dining table (which is probably also designed by the architect or designer). 

This wholistic design approach, while used in other countries and cities where Art Nouveau flourished, was probably taken to a new level of obsessiveness under Jugendstil. In Germany and Vienna, the architect or designer (or designers) were striving to create a Gesamtkunstwerk, or "total work of art". Others around the world may have been doing something close to the same thing, but they didn't have a special name for it. Jugendstil (which means "young style") did.

So what are these shades of grey I mentioned a couple of paragraphs back? Well, look, I'm no art or architectural historian, but it seems to me that while all forms of Art Nouveau draw inspiration from nature, Jugendstil draws decidedly more from human forms than any other manifestation of the movement. Go to Glasgow and you'll find flowers as decorative elements in the works of Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Visit Paris or Brussels and you'll find columns or handrails designed by Hector Guimard or Victor Horta that look decidedly like lilies or the stems of some other elegant plant. And stand on the roof of the Casa Batllo in Barcelona and you'll swear Antoni Gaudí clad the roof in dragon scales. But you won't find any people to speak of.

The Ankeruhr Clock, on Bauernmarkt near Hoher Markt, Vienna. Franz Matsch, designer.

Take a look at the roof of the Post Office Savings Bank in Vienna and you'll find a couple of what can only really be described as some sort of mythological gods or goddesses. You'll find something similar in the murals on the outside of the Vienna Secession Building or in the center of the Ankeruhr Clock. I'm not sure if these are manifestations of deities or sprites or just regular everyday humans but there is (for me at least) a fantastical quality to the way these people are represented. They seem otherworldly, like something out of a Tolkien novel.

I'm sure that is dumbing down the difference between Jugendstil and what was going on in France, Belgium, Spain, Scotland and elsewhere throughout the continent to an almost offensive level but that's how I see it. I also see decoration that is far more geometrical in a very German way. In case labeling something "German" doesn't adequately convey an immediate and specific reaction, I see motifs that are rigid, regular, repeated, formal and imperial.

Otto Wagner designed apartment block on the Linke Wienzeile (top) and the Wagner Villa II (bottom).

Most architectural or art movements or styles (it's the last time I'll do that, I promise) have some key or defining figures that dominate or guide or define the movement. Jugendstil in Vienna is no exception. Architects Joseph Maria Olbrich was hugely important as a founding father and Josef Hoffman contributed as much (if not more) as a product designer than a designer of buildings and guiding light of the movement.

But from the architecture side of things, Otto Wagner was clearly the most important figure in the Vienna Secession. He may not have played as important a role as Olbrich or Hoffmann in getting things off the ground, but he was the most embraced by the city and empire (like literally in terms of commissions) and clearly was the most prolific designer who contributed lasting works that are still around today a century or more later.

If there is one other notable difference between the Vienna Secession and other similar movements in Europe, it's that at least one of the founders is an artist and one of the leading tourist draws to Vienna today. Gustav Klimt's works (including his most famous painting The Kiss) are some of the star attractions in Vienna's Belvedere Museum. I don't think you will find any other artist that is as aligned with an Art Nouveau movement that has the standing and stature of Klimt. Lalique doesn't count for me there.

Klimt's The Kiss at the Belvedere (top), with adoring throngs, and the Beethoven Frieze (bottom) at the Secession Building.

There are no shortage of Jugendstil works to visit in Vienna, including a number which you can actually walk into and around and linger a while. The Vienna Secession building is still in use as it was originally intended as an art display space 124 years (!!!) after it was completed and first opened. There are also a number of Otto Wagner buildings open to the public, although not all are in use as originally intended including the first house he built for himself and a number of the original U stations that he designed, some of which are now museums or exhibition spaces.

There are also a number of works in and around the city center of Vienna, including the Altmann and Kuehne chocolatier (facade designed by Josef Hoffmann), a few Wagner apartment buildings and the magnificent Ankeruhr Clock designed by Franz Matsch. I don't know how we missed Hoffmann's chocolate store. I had it on my list and we must have walked by it at least twice (and maybe more). Distracted, I guess. It happens. Too much Christmas.

Picture of a VW on the street with Otto Wagner's Kirche am Steinhof in the background.

Speaking of Christmas...maybe not the best time to go to see as much Jugendstil as you can handle. Otto Wagner's U Pavillion on the Karlsplatz is now a museum celebrating Wagner's life and work. But not in December. Or November, January, February or the first half of March. You'll find something similar (meaning a museum which is closed in late fall and winter) at the emperor's personal railway station, the Hofpavillion, at the Schönbrunn Palace. I assume that the deal here is that these structures are not insulated and therefore not suitable for use in cold weather, but that's pure speculation on my part.

Good luck getting to one of Wagner's masterpieces, the Kirche am Steinhof, in December also. You can get there and get inside, but only if you arrange a visit in advance, pony up more than 100 Euros as a flat fee and pay a per person fee on top of that. If you do decide to do that, plan your trip out there carefully and make sure you end up at the door of the church, not within sight of the church on the other side of the hospital grounds that the church sits on. 

Despite not being willing to pay the fee to visit the inside of the Kirche, I figured we should go out there anyway since it's one of Wagner's major works. We Ubered and got dropped off right in front of the main entrance to the hospital to the south of the church. Accessing the exterior of the building would be just a quick walk through the hospital property. Easy, right?

Not so easy, we were informed. Not at that entrance. You have to walk further down to the west, we were told. Next hospital entrance...same story. And at the next. And the next. Eventually we gave up. We were into the walk less than a mile probably with another couple to go on snowy sidewalks in the cold. We never made it to the Kirche. We Ubered out of there onto other things. 

Majolikahaus, Linke Wienzeile 40 (top) and the Wagner Villa I (bottom).

So after all that whining and complaining, I'll say that I actually did get a really good Jugendstil experience out of our week in Vienna. It ended up being shaped mostly by the Secession Building; Otto Wagner's first residence; the Post Office Savings Bank; and the MAK Vienna (or in English, the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts).

If there's a classic, must-see Jugendstil building in Vienna, it's the Secession Building. It was literally the first place in Vienna we visited on our arrival after checking in at the hotel and getting some lunch at the nearby Nachsmarkt. Yes, this trip was about the Christmas markets but you can't see those in all their glory in the middle of the day. The Secession Building was the starting point of this trip.

When the artists who made up the membership of the Viennese Secession movement first got together as an organized bunch, the first thing they did was design and pay for their own building to be built. Must be nice, right? Nothing like announcing your presence as a group of artists by erecting a building just outside the historic center of Vienna. A poor group of starving artists, they were not, apparently.

I've been waiting decades to lay eyes on the Secession Building, with its stark white walls with cryptic messages in Latin and its "dome" made out of gold covered leaves. I expected it would be enormous to hold all the exhibit spaces that were the goal of the building and I imagined the famous Beethoven Frieze, one of Gustav Klimt's masterworks, ringing the rotunda at the top of the building formed by the gold leaf dome. 

Neither of those things are true. It is an efficiently compact building (I mean, it's in Europe; what did I really expect?) in the middle of a very old and historic city with its main gallery space in the rear of the building hidden from the front entrance side and precious little other gallery space elsewhere. And there is no gallery or rotunda in the leaf dome. Of course there isn't; you can actually see through the leaves to the sky above and beyond. It's a crown on the building, not the crowning space inside the building.

The Beethoven Frieze is in the basement. Really didn't expect that.

It is clear from visiting the Secession Building that the focus of the design inside was to display the art, and not the building. I guess that's smart. The building was not the point. The point was the gallery space and the forum for artists. Olbrich allowed his expression on the exterior of the building, from the various types of leaves of gold coated ornament, lines drawn on the building and actual trees planted in pots at the front door to a mural by Koloman Moser to a couple of trios of perched owls on the south facade. For a starting point to visit buildings executed by the Vienna Secession, the eponymous building is a great place to start in a number of ways.

I don't get Klimt, by the way. Just can't figure out the appeal. Maybe I'm not smart enough to understand. Other than The Kiss and maybe one or two other pieces, I find his works to be strange. His renderings of almost lifelike women on flat canvasses which look like they are being consumed by gold reminds me of the graphics in Tron (the original 1980s version), although I guess Tron should really remind me of Klimt. And I really don't get the Beethoven Frieze. Yes, I read the accompanying brochure in the building but I really can't see how naked women, gold-clad knights, starving and grotesque references to mythology and a giant ape have anything to do with Beethoven's Ode to Joy.

The Secession Building from the northwest. Not the greatest pic but it was raining and I didn't get a good front view.

The Secession Building main exhibition space. 

A trio of owls on the south facade of the building.

For all its importance to the movement, the Secession Building is a public work for displaying art and it's restrained, if you can really use that term to describe anything Art Nouveau (I believe you can). To find Jugendstil in all its excess, we'd need to get a lot more private. Like private house type of private. Like one built for Otto Wagner BY Otto Wagner. His first house, or villa, is now a museum. Although it's not a museum to Wagner.

Wagner built his first self-designed house sometime in the 1880s. When he sold it and moved next door to his second self-designed house, the house ran through a series of owners (including the Nazis in World War II) until it was purchased by Ernst Fuchs, an artist who in my very limited experience seems to be fixated on the Bible, mythological creatures and the exaggerated female body in most all his works. If I don't understand Klimt much, I really don't understand the point of Fuchs at all. His works are completely in your face offensive to me. Maybe that's the point.

Most of Wagner's first Villa looks nothing like it did when Otto Wagner was in residence. It has definitely been very Fuchs-ified from my point of view, although he apparently likely saved it from complete ruin when he purchased it in the 1970s. But there is one room, the Adolf Böhm parlor, which is full-on Jugendstil as Wagner left it. And it's spectacular.

This room used to be Wagner's studio and it is the space where he produced some of his masterworks, including the very inaccessible-in-winter Kirche am Steinhof. Everything about the room drips with Jugendstil, from snakes on the floor to the art glass windows to the gold stucco piping on the walls and ceiling (the Secession definitely had a thing about gold). It's a true mix between nods to nature of images of pure fantasy. It's absolutely gorgeous in the most decadent way. It's nothing like Art Nouveau in Paris or Brussels but it's still amazing.

It's also a complete collaboration. The art glass was the work of the room's namesake, Adolf Böhm, and the stucco work was executed by Joseph Maria Olbrich (of the Secession Building fame). I can't recall other Art Nouveau works being executed in such a partnership fashion.

The Adolf Böhm parlor, Otto Wagner Villa I, Vienna.

We saved the best until last.

When I said the first place we went to when we got to Vienna was the Secession Building, I wasn't kidding. It perfectly kicked off our Jugendstil experience in the city. The last place we visited in the city closed it; Otto Wagner's masterwork, the Post Office Savings Bank. If there is one true mature public work of architecture in Vienna executed by a Jugendstil designer, it's the Post Office Savings Bank over on the east side of the city just inside the Ringstrasse.

Art Nouveau and Jugendstil are great. I love experiencing these works of architecture and imagining the struggles that their creators went through trying to reconcile new methods of artistic expression using new materials made available by the industrial revolution that swept Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. When it gets resolved by a great architect, the result is sublime.

Everything that we saw about the Post Office Savings Bank was worth waiting for but (and in the interest of making what is already a very long post just a little bit shorter than it absolutely could be) there were a few things that stood out. Starting with the way the exterior of the building fronts onto the Georg-Coch-Platz, a small square of space off the Ringstrasse on top of (of all things) an underground parking garage entrance. It's a simple thing, here, but the main entrance of the Bank perfectly stops the space off Vienna's most important road while also displaying Wagner's opus in an ideal frame.

Most of this building was designed to hold the offices of the staff that made the bank work every day so there are precious few spaces or details that excite. The exterior of the building, with its patterned facade and god or goddess or angelic forms heralding the arrival of something seemingly really worth heralding is restrained and well-conceived while also clearly still rooted in classicism. The interior is better.

The front of the Post Office Savings Bank (top). Looking up into a stairwell (bottom).

If the prior paragraph seems to contradict itself, I'll agree with that. Inside the building there is a small museum in the rear of the main banking hall detailing the history of the competition for the building's design. The exhibit is organized around a reconstruction of one of the small banking halls which appears to be faithfully recreated but otherwise not spectacular. I found the competition part of the exhibit interesting in two respects: (1) Wagner technically broke the rules of the competition brief by combining spaces which were previously thought of as separate and distinct; and (2) I have never heard of any of the other entrants. 

I'm not sure if we were supposed to wander around the building on our own after we finished in the museum but we did a bit anyway in search of details and other nuggets of interest. The stairs are pretty cool. The detailing on the railings is awesome. These days of great architects custom designing and fabricating railings must have been amazing. There were several railing designs that I thought were cool in Vienna (including those at Karl Ehn's Karl Marx Hof).

But the room that made me weak in the knees was the main banking hall. This was the main public space in the building and was clearly (unless we didn't discover something amazing elsewhere) the most important and carefully designed space in the whole place. It is grand, it is well organized, it is functional and it is full of diffuse light due to the laylight and skylights above the room itself. For the early 20th century in a society used to dark, poorly lit workspaces, it must have been a revelation. It must have blown away the employees and the customers with its quality. And I say this because it blew me away in 2022.

Today, the main banking hall is a cafe. Or it was when we were there, although I get the impression it's probably some kind of multipurpose space when they are not serving drinks and snacks in the middle of the day. The cafe is a great idea by the way. I don't know how many works of modern architecture that I've been to where I've stared at nothing going on in the spaces that were once buildings for people to BE in but which are now museums. Being able to sit for a while with a beer and take everything in was super valuable.

I know earlier in this post I complained about the number of buildings in Vienna that were closed when we visited last month. I've also complained in this blog a lot about how many trips COVID forced us to re-schedule over the last couple of years. But honestly, if COVID hadn't hit Vienna last fall, we wouldn't have been able to visit the Post Office Savings Bank because until a couple of months ago, it was closed for renovations for over a year. Sometimes, bad luck works out.

The small banking hall (top) and view of the main banking hall (bottom).

It seemed to me when I returned from Vienna that our Jugendstil journey there was full of closed buildings and failed attempts at making it to landmarks big and small for a variety of reasons. Looking back at the length of this post and the number of pictures posted here, I'm not sure that's true. It may have been not what I would have done when I was in my late 20s or early 30s and obsessed with architecture trips, but I think we got a pretty comprehensive look at what was going on Art Nouveau-wise in Vienna at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries.

I am positive we missed a lot. I'm also positive I really have no regrets about our overall experience here. I think our Jugendstil quest was really pretty solid.

One final note: there is one place we managed to visit to fill in some gaps, including what must have at one time filled the offices and public spaces at the Post Office Savings Bank. That would be the furniture, of course. Just a short walk around the Ringstrasse you will find the MAK, Vienna's (and indeed, Austria's) museum dedicated the applied arts, including furniture making. At one time, architects managed to find the time to design furniture to fill the buildings they designed as well as the actual buildings. If you are interested in that sort of stuff, the MAK has an incredible collection of furniture designed by Josef Hoffman, the Thonets and a lot of stuff that Otto Wagner created, including desks, wardrobes, chairs and tables for the Post Office Savings Bank. I thought it was worth a visit to complete our Post Office Saving Bank experience. 

Wow that was a long post! That's all I got on this one!

Otto Wagner: Furniture from the Post Office Savings Bank. At the MAK, Vienna.

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How We Did It

There's a lot I could write about here. I'll try to be brief and concentrate on the four main buildings we actually visited on our trip in addition to some other resources I used when planning our time seeking out architecture in Vienna.

The Vienna Secession Building is open Tuesday through Sunday 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Like a lot of museums in Europe they are closed on Mondays but their late opening hours every other day of the week make up for it somewhat. I know I've plugged the Vienna City Card on my snow globe post but that card gets you a free audio guide tour of the building here. There are some holidays when the building is closed.

The Ernst Fuchs Museum is also open Tuesday through Sunday but 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Like the Secession Building they are also closed on certain holidays and like the Secession Building there is a benefit to flashing your Vienna City Card (3 Euro discount per person, here). Getting to the Ernst Fuchs Museum is not easy or convenient. We Ubered there (although we were asked by our driver if the museum was open...) and took the 52A or 52B (can't remember which; both run the same route) back to the U4 at the Hütteldorf station. The bus stop is right across the street from the Wagner Villa II, which is right next to the Fuchs Museum.

The Post Office Savings Bank Museum is open Monday through Friday 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. On Thursdays, they stay open an extra couple of hours until 8. The cafe in the main banking hall is on a similar schedule except they close at 6 on Thursdays and stay open until 8 on Fridays.

The MAK is open Tuesday through Sunday 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. with late opening (until 9) on Tuesday.

Finally, I found two websites essential to my research in getting to all these buildings: Vienna Unwrapped and Visiting Vienna. There are a number of posts on both websites related to architecture in general and Jugendstil in particular. I found both sites' articles particularly helpful in getting me to websites with opening hours.

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