"Those who have attained the heights of civilized refinement in their daily life, even if they have otherwise little time for art, make certain demands on the things which satisfied them, upon their whole environment, demands which can be satisfied only with the art of art." -
Ver Sacrum, 1900.
"I liked the atmosphere of the house, although its slightly oriental magnificence was less reminiscent of Schindler's time than of the age of Ingres and Delacroix...Japanese vases, great sprays of peacock feathers, Persian carpets on the walls."
To celebrate the New Year and the success of their association, on January 19, 1900 the Union of Austrian Artists, better known as the Vienna Secession, threw themselves a party. Who better to host the festivities than Carl Moll
(1861-1945), artist, dealer, and enthusiatic party-giver? His new home, decorated with an extravagant orientalism that was anathema to Secessionist ideals, was conveniently located at No. 6 Theresianumgasse, just off the Ringstrasse. A duplex designed by architect Josef Hoffmann, it was also home to Koloman Moser, Moll's cofounder in the Secession. The Hohe Warte, as the area was called, was just in the process of becoming an art colony when the Molls moved there.
Thirty-six men and three women were invited. It was that kind of group, Vienna was that kind of place, and Carl Moll was that kind of man in a world where women were objects of fascination and suspicion, women who seemed bent on exercising free agency, even without legal, social, or economic rights. No wonder the gaiety often was laced with hysteria.
Moll had been a student of the artist Emil Schindler, living in Schindler's home and lusting after Schindler's wife. When the master died in 1892, Moll promptly married the widow Anna and became stepfather to Alma Schindler (later Mahler, then Gropius, then Werfel). Alma, whose childhood ambition was to "fill her garden with geniuses" was twenty in 1900. Anna, the prudent mother, mindful of her own history, decreed that Alma and her younger step-sister Gretl remain upstairs during the party.
But Alma had already been flirting with the painter Klimt, who had no more scruples about seducing his friend's nubile daughter than he did about living in a highly irregular situation with his own sister-in-law. At a previous dinner at the Molls', Klimt had shown Alma how to make a heart shape with her roll and he then pierced it with a toothpick, like an arrow. To make sure she got the point, he poured wine on it and declared it an excellent likeness of "my wounded heart." Carl and Anna took their daughters on an extended tour of Italy but Klimt followed them from Genoa to Verona, escalating from kisses to outright propositions. Only a direct appeal from Carl Moll stopped Klimt's pursuit. Now the two would be under the same roof on the same evening.
To set the stage for the evening, Kolo Moser designed invitations and place cards, and Josef Hoffmann designed the silverware. "When they first showed up at the Secession exhibitions, a tremor ran through the eating world. People maintained it was quite impossible to eat with it, not eat properly, and certainly not in the 'English' manner!" wrote critic Joseph August Lux. Even so, the guests managed to spear the geometric-shaped dessert ices and scoop up the whipped cream and fruits stewed in liqueur.
Alma was allowed to help with the preparations and left us this diary entry: "We had girandoles and as a centerpiece, a fruit bowl surrounded with flowers - and garlands, with which they later decked me out. On the table for the older guests, the centerpiece was Hellmer's water-nymph - also surrounded with flowers and garlands, and all the ladies had larges bouquets of violets. Attached to each bouquet was a card inscribed with a little poem, which was passed around and signed by each guest in turn."
A string quartet from the Vienna Philharmonic was hired to serenade the guests and provide music for dancing. It was the final straw for Alma, who had studied piano and composition with the composer Alexander von Zemlinsky, another of her conquests. The male guests easily located Alma, watching from an upstairs anteroom and the dancing began. Kolo Moser introduced Alma to another Secessionist, Josef Maria Auchentaller, who said: "I say, she's pretty." Moser (remember, he lived next door) eventually proposed marriage to Alma on several occasions, unsuccessfully.
Exactly how the evening ended is unclear but we do know that when Moll discovered Alma at the party, other revelers picked him up and carried him off. Two men, identified as Franz Hohenberger and Maximillian Lenz, put lampshades on their heads and did a "mock-Japanese" dance.
In an extension of this expansive mood, the Eighth Secession Exhibition planned for later in the year, would be organized around the theme "European Arts And Crafts." Its invited guests Margaret Macdonald and Charles Rennie Mackintosh would make an impression with their descriptions of arts workshops, introducing the workshop idea that led to a new secession when Klimt, Moser and others left to organize the Wiener Werkstatte in 1903. But that is another story. As is the way that Carl Moll 's place in the Vienna Secession has been written out of most histories.
(You may also be interested in The Absence of Carl Moll, published here September 21, 2009.).
Founded in the spring of 1897 by a group of young artists, including Max Kurzweil and Josef Engelhart along with those already mentioned, the Secessionists were dissatisfied with the stodginess of the establishment (a frequent complaint of the young). They elected Gustav Klimt as their first president.
Taking note of the success of new journals promoting the
Jugendstil movement (
Pan in Berlin - 1895,
Jugend in Munich - 1896) the Secessionists published their own journal
Ver Sacrum (Sacred Spring) in January of 1898. Alfred Roller's cover for the first issue, with its tree bursting from the confines of its pot, foretold the group's expansion in every direction. What bound these disparate artists together was both theory (art should not be limited to creating illusion or verisimilitude) and practice (decorative objects are just as important as painting and sculpture).
The first Secession exhibition opened on March 26, creating an immediate sensation. And how could it not, when it introduced Vienna to the works of Fernand Khnopff and Constant Meunier (Belgium), Auguste Rodin and Puvis de Chavannes (France), Giovanni Segantini (Italy) and Whistler (United Stated)? By the time their second exhibition debuted on November 12, it was held in their own Secession Hall designed by Josef Hoffmann. The place eventually earned the nickname of 'The Golden Cabbage.'
Images:
"I liked the atmosphere of the house, although its slightly oriental magnificence was less reminiscent of Schindler's time than of the age of Ingres and Delacroix...Japanese vases, great sprays of peacock feathers, Persian carpets on the walls."
To celebrate the New Year and the success of their association, on January 19, 1900 the Union of Austrian Artists, better known as the Vienna Secession, threw themselves a party. Who better to host the festivities than Carl Moll (1861-1945), artist, dealer, and enthusiatic party-giver? His new home, decorated with an extravagant orientalism that was anathema to Secessionist ideals, was conveniently located at No. 6 Theresianumgasse, just off the Ringstrasse. A duplex designed by architect Josef Hoffmann, it was also home to Koloman Moser, Moll's cofounder in the Secession. The Hohe Warte, as the area was called, was just in the process of becoming an art colony when the Molls moved there.
Thirty-six men and three women were invited. It was that kind of group, Vienna was that kind of place, and Carl Moll was that kind of man in a world where women were objects of fascination and suspicion, women who seemed bent on exercising free agency, even without legal, social, or economic rights. No wonder the gaiety often was laced with hysteria. 
To set the stage for the evening, Kolo Moser designed invitations and place cards, and Josef Hoffmann designed the silverware. "When they first showed up at the Secession exhibitions, a tremor ran through the eating world. People maintained it was quite impossible to eat with it, not eat properly, and certainly not in the 'English' manner!" wrote critic Joseph August Lux. Even so, the guests managed to spear the geometric-shaped dessert ices and scoop up the whipped cream and fruits stewed in liqueur.
Alma was allowed to help with the preparations and left us this diary entry: "We had girandoles and as a centerpiece, a fruit bowl surrounded with flowers - and garlands, with which they later decked me out. On the table for the older guests, the centerpiece was Hellmer's water-nymph - also surrounded with flowers and garlands, and all the ladies had larges bouquets of violets. Attached to each bouquet was a card inscribed with a little poem, which was passed around and signed by each guest in turn." 
Taking note of the success of new journals promoting the Jugendstil movement (Pan in Berlin - 1895, Jugend in Munich - 1896) the Secessionists published their own journal Ver Sacrum (Sacred Spring) in January of 1898. Alfred Roller's cover for the first issue, with its tree bursting from the confines of its pot, foretold the group's expansion in every direction. What bound these disparate artists together was both theory (art should not be limited to creating illusion or verisimilitude) and practice (decorative objects are just as important as painting and sculpture).
Images:
“”He succeeded in granting the most concrete and most commonplace things - a half empty parlor, a chair, a chest of drawers, a sofa, a beautiful book, a wall with a small forlorn picture, a while door, a short hallway, dust dancing in sunbeams – a quality not of this world, a reflection of sublime existence. His highly intense nervous life, his acutely sensitive emotional being, flourished only in this world of extreme simplicity and silence, tones were what he loved and sought – the tones of stillness. He heard…stillness, and that was where he really existed.” – Julius Elias, 1916
Photographs of Ida and Vilhelm taken during their courtship show another side from the ones we encounter on the painter's canvases. This is no small distinction when both came from artistic families: Ida's brother Peter Ilsted became a well-known follower of Hammershoi and Vilhelm's younger brother Svend (1879-1916) was a respected painter and ceramicist. Where Hammershoi's self-portrait shows a highly serious young man, the photographer caught him with a twinkle in his eye, the kind of look that may have attracted the artistically aware Ida Ilsted.
Also this 1898 photograph suggests a more sensual side to Ida than the artist was able or willing to paint. The young boy pictured with them was their foster son Henry Madsen (1881-1921), possibly the son of art critic Karl Madsen, who is one of the guests in the photograph of the party at the Hammershois' Strandgade 30 apartment.
Hammershoi moved beyond realism early in his career. Critics have noted anomalies, such as missing piano legs and Ida's missing foot in the interior at right, which is also unusual in showing us the view across the street. In his paintings, light seems to dissolve the outer boundaries these otherwise controlled images, so what we get is something more like psychological realism. 
We know is that Hammershoi moved the furniture to suit his pictorial ideas. We may not realize the strangeness of 19th century floor plans to modern eyes. Used to houses and apartments designed as a group of rooms around a hallway, not to mention Freudian and Jungian symbolism, we are sensitive to these arrangements. The apartments that the Hammershois lived in were typical in being a series of rooms that opened into each other, one after another. Halls were an additional expense and heating them was difficult.
The open door is thought to be symbolic shorthand for hope. Closed doors, on the other hand, are symbolic of refusal, of finality. A closed door may also be a break with the past. Even the ancient Greeks found in doors the symbolic separation of past and future. Following their lead, the Shakespearean scholar, Gary Taylor has named death as "the one way walk through the door between culture and history." Carl Jung was rather heavy-handed in seeing doors as symbolically female.
Doors have also seen as symbols of refuge. Jung thought doors were a feminine symbol. In A Dictionary of Symbols, J.E. Cirlot makes an interesting observation about doors in discussing temple doors and altars: 
On a more prosaic level, doors figured in the the couple's life because they traveled frequently and for extended periods, beginning with their six month honeymoon in Paris. Another trip to London and the Netherlands lasted from October 1897 to May 1898, with a brief return home for the holidays, and followed on the heels of the sale of two paintings to the Russian impresario Serge Diaghilev. Hammershoi was, in fact, enjoyed an international success never before accorded a Danish artist.
The German painter Emil Nolde lived in Copenhagen for some time circa 1900 and he found Hammershoi to be a quiet person. So did the poet Rainer Maria Rilke who visited in 1904 to collect material for a monograph on the artist that was never completed, unlike his 1903 publication Auguste Rodin. "Hammershoi is not one of those about whom one must speak quickly. His work is long and slow, and at whichever moment one apprehends it, it will speak of what is important and essential in art." - Rilke
Images: Photographs from the collection of the Royal Library, Copenhagen. Paintings from: Musee d'Orsay, Paris. State Museum of Art, Copenhagen. Collection of her Royal Highness, Princess Benedickte, Copenhagen. Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Aarhus. Ordrupgaard Museum, Charlottenlund.
Although English, Daphne Maugham was born while her father Charles Maugham was there on diplomatic assignment, probably in Paris. Several family members distinguished themselves in diplomacy and the arts, most notably Daphne's uncle, the writer W. Somerset Maugham.
I find her tactile use of color appealing, its unforced naturalness gives little hint of the mastery it required. 
At times associated with the Metaphysical painters around Giorgio de Chirico, and at other times with the Magic Realist group Novocento, whose members included Giacomo Balla and Giorgio Morandi, Casorati's art has its own core of technique and interest. Crystal clear purity of color and enigmatic subject matter are obvious. 
Along the way, Casorati absorbed other influences. The son of a famous methematician father, he studied law (like so many future artists, to please his parents). They might have guessed what was to come; as an adolescent, Felice Casorati devoted such energy to his music lessons that he collapsed from nervous exhaustion. It was while taking a rest cure in Padua, that he began to paint in 1902, and by 1907, he had his first painting accepted by the Venice Biennial. A room dedicated to Gustav Klimt at the 1910 Biennial inspired several images like this mother and child from 1917. Typically, Casorati showed no inclination to hide his influences, seemingly confident in his ability to use them for his own purposes. He borrowed the decorative aspects of the Vienna Secession without its nervous eroticism.
The artist often spoke of his admiration for the works of the 15th century Renaissance master Piero della Francesca, particularly their "atmosphere of immobility." Like Casorati's father, Piero della Francesca published works on mathematics and geometry. In turn, Casorati performed his own experiments with perspective. 
By 1921, when Casorati painted The Woman and the Suit of Armour he was an influential member of Turin's intellectual circle. He had founded an art school there that attracted many students and spent some time in prison for his anti-Fascist activities. The picture was certainly viewed by his contemporaries in light of Giorgio de Chirico's widely discussed essay We Metaphysicists, published in 1919 In the picture, a suit of armour straight out of the Futurist playbook looms behind a naked woman whose thoughts, metaphysical or otherwise, regard the unseen future with skepticism.
Bok used the pages of the Journal to promote women's suffrage, pacifism, and conservation. He persuaded America's presidents to address his readers through its pages. The rugged Theodore Roosevelt lauded American Women As Mothers, while the scandal-plagued adulterous Grover Cleveland weighed in on The Honest American Marriage, and Herbert Hoover gave instruction on Thrift And The American Woman to combat the rigors of the Great Depression.
Even as the magazine promoted equal rights for women it inevitably reflected the ambivalence of society at large. Women's Chances As Breadwinners by the artist Gleeson White fretted over a "lack of supreme talent" as though men didn't have the same problem. Remedies For Cooking Disasters was suitably alarmist in tone. And Menus For Entertaining The Bride includes the deliciously symbolic dish 'Blushing Fluff', a sweet concoction of whipped cream, egg whites, and stewed rhubarb.
