So the next time you’re looking to add an element of European Art Nouveau to your space, consider the designs of the Weiner Werkstätte and Vienna Secession.
Hoffmann’s globe lighting design is so elemental that it has inspired countless iterations and is still being reproduced today. You might snag a 1900 Josef Hoffmann Bentwood settee for $5,816 on 1 st Dibs. The Vienna Workshops Style influenced later generations of designers of jewely. Nowadays, Vienna Secession and Weiner Werkstätte pieces command prices in the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. The best-known artist of the Vienna Secession movement is Gustav Klimt. This movement included painters, sculptors, and architects. The Vienna Secession grew out of a dissatisfaction with the traditional practices of the Kunstlerhausgenossenschaft an association. “There was a period when people threw away this kind of furniture, saying ‘we prefer new stuff,’ and then maybe 20 years later, they said, ‘oh my god, why did we throw away this furniture? How stupid we were!’ Because then it was rediscovered in the ‘80s.” The Vienna Secession (German: Wiener Secession also known as the Union of Austrian Artists, or Vereinigung Bildender Künstler Österreichs) was formed in 1897 by a group of Austrian artists who had resigned from the Association of Austrian Artists, housed in the Vienna Künstlerhaus. Built by Joseph Maria Olbrich, the building features a white, Jugendstil design topped by a cupola constructed from 2,500 gilded iron laurel leaves. Much of the work of the artists of the Vienna Secession and Weiner Werkstätte is now housed in museums like the Leopold Museum, the Belvedere Museum (home to the world’s largest collection of works by Klimt), and the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna and the Neue Galerie in New York City, but according to Pokorny, the style is seeing a resurgence in the art market as well. First, you have the architecture of the Secessionsgebäude itself, which was fully renovated in 2018. Members of the Vienna Secession foundation Getty Images