Art in Vienna, 1898-1918: Klimt, Kokoschka, Schiele and Their Contemporaries

London: Phaidon, 1975. Hardcover. VG-/G- (age toning along textblock - dust jacket small tears to bottom front and top back covers, sticker residue on front cover, still protective). Blue cloth boards, gold gilt lettering on the spine, plum purple illustrated dust jacket with white lettering, 256 pp. 214 color and bw plates. "Artistically stagnant at the end of the nineteenth century, the imperial city of Vienna was profoundly shaken by the radical artists of the Secession group. Their works at first shocked the conservative public, but a series of provacative exhibitions held between 1998 and 1903, their magazine, Ver Sacrum, one of the outstanding literary and artistic periodicals of the day, and their enthusiastic involvement in the applied arts and architecture soon brought them an ardent following and wealthy patronage. Art in Vienna traces the development of the Secession, whose members included Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele in the visual arts, and Otto Wagner, Adolf Loos, and Josef Hoffmann in architecture and the applied arts. It vividly captures the excitement and artistic ferment of a period when the painter and graphic artist Alfred Roller, founding member of the Secession, collaborated as a stage designer with the great composter and director Gustav Mahler in a brilliant series of operatic productions, and the Wiener Werkstatte, a craft association that developed out of the Secession, was given a unique opportunity to create a totally intergrated piece of art, architecture, and interior design - the famous Palais Stoclet in Brussels. Analyzing the individual works and careers of the artists and architects, Peter Vergo quotes extensively from writings - by contemporary reviewers and critics and the artits themselves - many of which were never previously published in English." - dust jacket description.