A white cube with a gilded dome of laurel leaves, built in 1898 as a manifesto, holding Klimt's Beethoven Frieze in the basement.
In 1897 a group of artists led by Gustav Klimt resigned from the Künstlerhaus, the official artists’ association, because it would not show contemporary work. They called themselves the Secession and within a year they had their own building.
Joseph Maria Olbrich designed it: a windowless white cube with a dome of 3,000 gilded laurel leaves that the Viennese immediately nicknamed the golden cabbage. Over the door is the movement’s motto — Der Zeit ihre Kunst, der Kunst ihre Freiheit, to every age its art, to art its freedom. It was, and reads as, a manifesto in building form, and in 1898 it was a genuine provocation on a street of historicist stone.
The Beethoven Frieze
In 1902 the Secession mounted an exhibition around Max Klinger’s Beethoven sculpture, and Klimt painted a 34-metre frieze around three walls of a side room as part of it. It was meant to be temporary and to be destroyed afterwards.
It was not. It survived in private hands, was bought by the Republic in 1973, restored over a decade, and installed permanently in a purpose-built basement room that reproduces the 1902 dimensions.
It reads as a sequence: the yearning of weak humanity, the knight who takes up the struggle, the hostile forces — Typhoeus as a great ape, with Gorgons, and figures of sickness, madness, death, lust and gluttony — and then, on the final wall, poetry, the choir of angels, and the embrace that quotes Schiller’s Ode to Joy.
It is thinly painted on plaster with gold, mother-of-pearl, glass and even curtain rings pressed into the surface, and it is much stranger and more unfinished-looking than the reproductions suggest. The room is low-lit and there is usually a bench.
The rest
Upstairs the Secession still functions as it was intended to: an artist-run exhibition space with no permanent collection, showing contemporary work in a top-lit hall. The programme is genuinely contemporary and often difficult. Your ticket covers it.
Practicalities
Closed Mondays. Small, and an hour is enough. It is a two-minute walk from the Naschmarkt and directly opposite the Otto Wagner Majolikahaus on Linke Wienzeile, whose tiled floral façade of 1899 is the other great Jugendstil building of the neighbourhood and costs nothing to look at.
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