History of the Avant-Garde (Part 15): A Family Affair - Art, Patronage, and Identity in Vienna

This essay is part of an extended and detailed series by Jeanne Willette. You can find other pieces in this series (to date) in the Avant-Garde section of this website.

Key Series: Art and Aesthetics

By Jeanne Willette

In 2013, the Dallas Museum of Art announced the acquisition of a wondrous object from Götterdämmerung that was fin-de-siècle Vienna, something called the “Wittgenstein Vitrine.” The Museum described the silver vitrine designed by Werkstätte artist Carl Otto Czeschka: “The Wittgenstein Vitrine (1908) stands over five feet tall and is made of solid silver encrusted with enamel, pearls, opals, moonstones, and other semiprecious stones.” It is hard to imagine something so extravagant and tall. The cabinet with glass shelves is over five feet high, the height of the average woman of the time, but at two hundred pounds, perhaps not her weight. The Vitrine embodies a story of wealth, social confidence and status, as well as taste and the place of what was considered an important family in Vienna. The contrast between the sense of doom hanging over a regime that had long ago lost its place in Europe and the sudden explosion of dazzling art and design in the final moments before the Great War finally euthanized the Austro-Hungarian Empire was so stunning and so unexpected that memories of Vienna at the end of its time are dazzled.

Carl Otto Czeschka, Wittgenstein Vitrine (1908)

Unlike Paris or Berlin, the art market of Vienna was underdeveloped and the artists were dependent upon the government for education and support and patronage. However, the Habsburg monarchy was conservative and living in a past at tragic odds with the modern present, making it impossible for art to grow and develop in relation to its own time. The Vienna Secession or the Vereinigung Bildender Künstler Österreichs burst out in 1897 when the younger artists, led by Gustav Klimt, walked out of the Genossenschaft bildender Künstler Wiens and formed their own organization. The emergence of three secessions in German-speaking centers—Munich, Vienna, and Berlin, in that order–was like a fire bell in the night, warning of a fundamental disjunction between generations.

In Munich and Berlin the gap was bridged by art dealers and within the art market, which afforded the dissident artists some support. However, in Vienna, the attitude towards art was very different. Rather than concentrating on discrete objects, such as a painting to be bought and sold, the artists in Vienna followed the mindset of Art Nouveau, collaboration among the arts, which would produce a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art. Not only did the artists and designers of Vienna work together in ways almost totally unknown in Western Europe, they also collaborated closely with their collectors and were in partnership with a group of patrons and collectors who were mostly Jewish.[i]

This union of artists who had ejected themselves out of the mainstream and benefactors who were not accepted by the ruling circles would bear artistic fruits that were both revolutionary and tragic for art. Led by the patriarch Karl Wittgenstein, who died in 1913 and who would be historically eclipsed by his son, Ludwig, the Wittgenstein family was perhaps the most prominent supporter of these artists.

Wittgenstein senior had worked in New York in his youth and returned to the Empire where he made a fortune in iron and steel. Living in the imposing Palais Wittgenstein, like many assimilated Jewish families in Austria, the family had converted to another religion, in their case Catholicism – a conversion which seemed more social than religious. As Marsha L. Rozenblit pointed out in “old Austria,” Jews were allowed to retain their own identity as Jews, even as assimilated Jews, as contrast to other nations where Jews were expected to be French first and Jews second, for example.[ii] The world of avant-garde art in Vienna was a world into which the Jewish patrons were allowed and welcomed. Elsewhere, Jews were barred traditional courts of culture, frozen out by the old nobility. New and floating freely through the stratified and ossified Viennese society, the avant-garde artists, like the Jewish residents, were themselves first and Austrians second, connected to each other not by the Emperor, Franz Josef, who symbolized all that was antiquated and left over from another era. Jewish families, like avant-garde artists, found their own avenues of success in fields not guarded by the landed gentry. True they were nouveau riche from taking advantage of new opportunities—Wittgenstein’s entry into steel at a time when architecture and construction had shifted to that material is a case in point. But these outsiders, these newcomers could also make themselves socially and culturally visible through the arts and make their cultural mark.

The Wittgenstein family, the children of Karl, seemed to have been uncommonly gifted, but sadly three of Karl Wittgenstein’s sons committed suicide, leaving Ludwig to carry on the family name in philosophy, where he would become one of the giants of the twentieth century. But Wittgenstein senior seemed to have found pleasure in the arts, as he helped to fund the new building for the Secession, designed by thirty-year old student of Otto Wagner, Josef Maria Olbrich and commissioning Gustav Klimt to commemorate the special events in the family with exquisite portraits. The Secession Building itself is one of the seminal buildings of modernist architecture. Not only was it significant in the history of architecture, it was also a highly visible statement of Wittgenstein’s support of cutting-edged art, rising above the elderly aesthetic of Vienna. Despite its famous “golden cabbage” headdress of 3,000 gilt laurel leaves, Olbrich’s building, if one strips it of its surface ornamentation, was an extreme architectural rejection of the historicism of the Ringstrasse. The original site was situated on that regressive arc of nineteenth century eclectic buildings, the Ringstrasse that enclosed the city. Predictibly, the city council, horrified at the modernity of the white blocks, refused to allow it to be built. Wisely, a new site was selected on Friedrichstrasse, where Olbrich completed his masterwork in six months, in 1898. The white cubes stacked upon each other would become the building blocks for the undecorated buildings of Adolf Loos a decade later. Inside, the cube was both white and open, with Olbrich’s invention of movable partitions and columns allowing for a constantly changeable interior, stressing flexibility and function over décor and decorum. Olbrich’s new vision of how modern art should be displayed and viewed would become the prototype for all museums of the twentieth century. Here in this temple of art, the leading artist of the day, Gustav Klimt would hold court.

Josef Maria Olbrich, Secession Building (1898)

As Steven Beller pointed out, although Secession artists were able to retain public patronage, much of the avant-garde activity in Vienna was supported by a number of Jewish families. The Wiener Werkstätte was financed by Fritz Wärndorfer and Klimt’s other important collector was August Lederer. Leopold Goldman commissioned Adolf Loos to design the famous Michaelerplatz building, and, in a city where interfaith marriage was countenanced, many artists, such as Koloman Moser, married into Jewish families.[iii] In addition, because these were professions open to Jews, a large portion of the university community, students and professors alike, the law and the press, were Jewish. Earning their incomes through inheritance or land, the traditional Gentile families did not have to earn their livings and looked down upon “trade” and all things market-related and would have never participated in “professions,” which is where Jewish people were clustered. Without the ruling classes being fully aware, the modern sources of power—knowledge, law and media–were all dominated by Jews. Indeed, avant-garde art in Vienna was known as “le gout juif.” It is in this milieu of collaboration between two social groups, part of Vienna and yet disconnected from the seat of power, artists and patrons, that the portraits and projects of Gustav Klimt can be best understood.

Klimt earned his daily bread from his portraits, almost exclusively of women who were wives and sisters and daughters of Jewish patrons. Tim Bonyhady pointed out that such was the prestige of Klimt’s portraits, that a family could achieve local fame based upon the artist’s interpretation of its women[iv] (Klimt did not paint men). The artist used the Secession exhibitions as a place to showcase his talents and his tender loving care of his patrons. He dressed the women in the modern reform dresses of fashion designer Emilie Flöge and made each and every woman look like a vision of Art Nouveau beauty.

Gustav Klimt, Portrait of Hermine Gallia (1904)

A very enterprising artist, an astute businessman, Klimt also held private viewings before the Secession opened and allowed his collectors to view not only the season’s extraordinary portraits but to also purchase other works on display. From the early 1900s, Klimt paid homage to those who supported his work: Baroness Elisabeth Bachofen-Echt was the daughter of August and Serena Lederer, Margarete Stonborough-Wittgenstein was of course Karl Wittgenstein’s daughter, and Hermine Gallia was the matriarch of a family made wealthy by a gaslight factory and inhabited an apartment decorated by Josef Hoffmann. These portraits were more than family paintings, they were signifiers of arrival, giving the families a sense of place and belonging in a city where they could forge an identity that was modern, lying beyond the old criteria of blood and land. The collaboration of the artists and their patrons, from Werkstätte designs to landscape paintings and portraits, forged a mutual partnership that was ultimately innocent of the underlying current of dark anti-Semitism. Three decades later, to the shock of the assimilated Jews of Vienna, still cherishing their Klimt paintings, their Moser chairs, and their Hoffmann interiors, the coming of the Anschluss ushered in a dark night of an obliteration of an identity so lovingly crafted.

Notes and references

[i] In the past decade numerous books have been written on the impact of the assimilated Jews of Vienna upon the culture of the city. A 2013 review in the TLS discussed several recent important books. See: Edward Timms. (2013). “The Golden Ages of Jewish Austro-Hungary.” The Times Literary Supplement

[ii] Marsha L. Rozenblit. ‪(2001). Reconstructing a National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria during World War I: The Jews of Habsburg Austria during World War I. Oxford: Oxford University

[iii] Steven Beller. (1989). Vienna and the Jews, 1867-1938: A Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

[iv] Tim Bonyhady. (2011). Good Living Street: Portrait of a Patron Family, Vienna 1900. New York: Pantheon Books

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Jeanne Willette

Art historian and art critic, Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette lives and works in Los Angeles. An art historian at Otis College of Art and Design, the widely published author covers the local art scene and is the publisher of the website Art History Unstuffed. With an international audience, this website and its accompanying podcasts provides the 21st version of learning about art, history, philosophy and theory. Synthesizing the most updated research and commentary on topics in modern and contemporary art and theory, the website issues weekly posts which explain challenging concepts for an audience of art history peers and advanced students of art and philosophy. Designed to built knowledge for the reader, the posts are arranged chronologically and categorically. Beginning art history students are invited to view a series of almost thirty videos, written and produced by Dr. Willette, on the survey of art, an Art History Timeline, from the Caves through Romanticism, accessed through iTunesU and YouTube by thousands of readers. In addition to Art History Unstuffed, Dr. Willette has published a book of her podcasts, Art History Unstuffed: The Podcasts is available through the iBooks. Long interested in the creation and construction of discourses, Dr. Willette has published a book on the intellectual matrix of original art critical response to Cubism, The Writing of Cubism: The Construction of a Discourse 1910-1914 and New Artwriting. Creating a Culture of Cyber Criticism, an examination of the production of knowledge in a postmodern age of “little narratives,” both available on her Amazon page.