Chronology
Chronology of Vienna Secession Building Expositions --1898-1905:
1898
Secession II
Nov. 12, 1898-Dec. 10, 1898. First exhibition in Joseph Maria Olbrich’s Vienna Secession Building; works by Viennese members including Gustav Klimt’s Pallas Athena, and a show hall for applied arts with wallpaper designs by Koloman Moser and Olbrich, plus works by Fernand Khnopff and Anders Zorn.
1899
Secession III
Jan. 20, 1899-Feb.1, 1899. Works included Max Klinger’s Christ on Olympus in the main hall with other rooms dedicated to Walter Crane, Eugene Grasset, Constantin Meunier, Felicien Rops, and Theo van Rysselberghe. Eighteen reproductions of Rysselberghe’s pictures were subsequently published in Ver Sacrum II, 1899.
Secession IV
Works by Austrian and foreign members of Secession.
Secession V
Drawings and graphic art, primarily by French artists.
1900
Secession VI
Japanese art.
Secession VII
March, 1900. Includes Gustav Klimt’s Philosophy, first of his three faculty pictures for the University of Vienna. Thirteen paintings and watercolors by Paul Signac; pictures by Fernand Khnopff and Jan Toorop.
Secession VIII
Autumn, 1900. International and Austrian applied arts. Works of Charles Robert Ashbee and Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Paintings by Rysselberghe, Khnopff, Degas, Bocklin, Menzel, and Ferdinand Hodler. One room was entirely devoted to the sculpture of the Belgian George Minne.
1901
Secession IX
Giovanni Segantini retrospective exhibition, at which Max Klinger and Auguste Rodin were each represented with fourteen works including Rodin’s plaster model for The Burghers of Calais. The main hall waas transformed into an octagonal shrine by Alfred Roller honoring Segantini’s three paintings entitled: Becoming, Being and Passing Away.
Secession X
Exclusively Austrian exhibition. Includes Gustav Klimt’s Medicine, which repeated the sscandal of his earlier Philosophy. Klimt’s painting of Judith.
Secession XI
Paintings by Johann Victor Kramer.
Secession XII
Jan Toorop, with twenty-one works exhibited. The Swiss painter Hodler showed and sold The Chosen One; Edvard Munch represented for the first time with his paintings Angst and Beach. Scandinavian, Swiss and Russian artists.
1902
Secession XIII
Works by Die Scholle (Native Earth, Munich artists’ union Gustav Klimt, and Arnold Bocklin; installation design by Koloman Moser.
Secession XIV
Gustav Klimt creates Beethoven Frieze as part of installation of Max Klinger’s sculpture Beethoven; installation designed by Josef Hoffman. (The exhibition also included reliefs by Hoffman and murals by Alfred Roller and Adolf Bohm, all of which were destroyed when the installation was dismantled. The Beethovan Frieze was left on view another year, then dismantled and sold).
Secession XV
Includes George Minne’s monument to the poet Rodenbach and works by Group Sztuka (Polish artists’ union); design cooperative Wiener Kunst im Haus, and etchings by Edvard Munch.
1903
Secession XVI
January - March, 1903. Great Impressionist Exhibition.
Theme: "The Development of Impressionism in Painting and Sculpture." The showing was divided into five sections with two hundred and fifty-nine art objects on display.
Section I - "The Origins and Development of Impressionism" represented by by Goya, El Greco, Rubens, Tintoretto, Velazquez, Vermeer, Delacroix, Corot, Daumier and others.
Section II - "Impressionism" showed primarily Manet, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Cezanne, Pissarro, Sisley and Morisot.
Sections III - "The Further Development of Impressionism" included works by Whistler, Liebermann, and Slevogt and the "Neo-Impressionists" such as Seurat, Rysselberghe and sculptures by Rodin and Meunier.
Section IV - Dedicated to Japanese art.
Section V - "Transition to the Style" displayed pictures by van Gogh (five), Toulouse-Lautrec (six), Vuillard (seven), Bonnard (Twelve), Denis (twelve), Vallotton (ten), Roussel (fourteen), Redon (ten), Gauguin (two), and Valtet (one).
Secession XVII
Featured work by artists associated with the Wiener Werkstatte-School of Applied Art founded by Kolomon Moser and Josef Hoffmann.
Secession XVIII
Major Gustav Klimt retrospective exhibition; including unfinished Jurisprudence; for the first time the three faculty pictures could be seen together. Installation design by Josef Hoffman and Kolo Moser.
1904
Secession XIX
Works by Cuno Amiet (thirty), Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Ferdinand Hodler (main hall; thirty-one pictures), Wilhelm Laage, Hans von Marees (ten), Jan Thorn-Prikker, and E.R. Weiss. Edvard Munch was represented with twenty pictures including A Summer’s Night in Aagaardstrand and Death of a Child in a room dedicated exclusively to his works.
Secession XX
Includes sculpture by Franz Metzner and Hugo Lederer.
1905
Secession XXI
Foreign painters.
Secession XXII
Sculpture by August Gaul, Josef Hanak, Max Klinger, Ivan Mestrovic, and Constantin Meunier.
Secession XXIII
Contemporary Austrian art; includes Otto Wagner’s designs for the Steinhof church and for the never-completed Stadtmuseum.
Secession XXIV
Beuron art school *this exhibition was produced after the Klimt Group seceded from the Secession.
*In 1905 the ongoing conflict between the naturalists, who had clung to many of the Kunstlerhaus tenets from the beginning of the Secession Movement, and the stylists finally proved irreconcilable. At that time Klimt, Auchentaller, Boehm, Hoffman, Moser and Roller, seceded from the Secession on the grounds that they could no longer be associated with the more realistic naturalists who refused to commit themselves to the "total work of art", a fundamental premise of the Secessionist Movement. The "Klimt Group" held their exhibitions in 1908 in the Kunstschau, a temporary pavilion built by Josef Hoffman, and the year represents the high-point in the decorative phase of late Art Nouveau.
Until 1945 the concept of a "solo artists exhibition" was unknown with the single exception of the retrospective in honor of Gustav Klimt in 1903. Until that time exhibitions typically included the works of between ten and one hundred painters, graphic artists and sculptors.
References:
Varnedoe, Kirk. Vienna 1900: Art, Architecture and Design. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1986.
Boubnova, Iaroslava et al (eds.). Vienna Secession: 1898-1998. Munich, New York: Prestel, 1998.