Vienna Secession

In 1897, nineteen artists meeting in a Vienna cafe broke from the conservative artists' association and founded one of their own. The word Secession comes from an episode in ancient Rome, when the plebeians walked out of the city to protest the aristocracy's abuses, secessio plebis. They named themselves after the act of leaving itself. Their first president was Gustav Klimt, and the entrance of the building they built still carries the inscription: To every age its art, to art its freedom. Then there is Klimt's gold. That his gold surfaces come from Japanese art is close to settled fact in art history, one scholar has written that without this element, Klimt could not have been Klimt. He did not just collect Japanese art, he studied it like a researcher. The gold ground of Rinpa painting, the flat planes and contour lines of ukiyo-e, the bold use of empty space, the gold that Ogata Kōrin once laid across a folding screen has crossed time and sea and is still shining on a wall in Vienna. One of the longest round trips on this whole map.