A cousin of art nouveau and the Arts and Crafts movement, the Viennese Secession celebrated bold colours and organic forms; its practitioners were open to international influences and were keen to start a conversation between painting, architecture and the decorative arts. The movement’s origins lay in the meetings of the Hagen Society, an informal group of artists who gathered regularly at Café Sperl and the Zum blauen Freihaus, where they dashed off portraits and caricatures and painted watercolour landscapes and dreamscapes. In 1905 the Society donated some 800 drawings to the Albertina and, although the museum exhibited some of them that year, this show is the largest display of these works to date (25 July–12 October). It includes drawings by founding members of the Secession such as Adolf Böhm, Johann Victor Krämer and Maximilian Lenz.
Find out more from the Albertina’s website.
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