Vienna around 1900 - a fascinating period in which the metropolis on the Danube became an important center of modernity. Historicism, art nouveau and expressionism, were the defining styles, all of which resonated with a touch of typical Viennese morbidity. Artists such as Gustav Klimt, Koloman Moser and Josef Hoffmann were united in their dream of forging a Gesamtkunstwerk, in which not only art, architecture and crafts, but also art and life itself were combined.

Fin-de-siecle Vienna was home to some of the most extraordinary minds of modern times, and was a vigorous melting-pot of radical new ideas and concepts in every field. Comprising 25 essays on the key movements and figures of the era, this volume offers a portrait of this astonishing cultural ferment."

"At the start of the 20th century, more than fifty artists gathered in Vienna with varying ideas but a common determination: to be free of the bourgeois morality and its obsolete traditions. The Vienna Secession, founded in 1897, would shape a distinctive form of art in Vienna and all over the world. Gustav Klimt, Richard Strauss, Otto Wagner, Sigmund Freud, Egon Schiele, and others all sought ways to break with the classicism of the Austro-Hungarian Empire on its decline. In his atmosphere of artistic, intellectual, and political effervescence, a new world was born."--Sitio web del editor.

The new presentation of the Leopold Museum's collection highlights the splendour and wealth of artistic achievements of an era shaped by the emergence of the Secessionists, the collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy and the deaths of eminent artists of Viennese Modernism, including Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Koloman Moser and Otto Wagner. Like the exhibition, the accompanying 560-page publication also aims to convey a sense of the character of this time and of the vibrant atmosphere in the metropolis of Vienna.Twelve scientific essays by renowned experts illustrate the historical aspects and biographies of the era's eminent protagonists whose fruitful synergy provided the basis for Vienna's unique cultural life around the turn of the century. A comprehensive appendix of illustrations shows the highlights of the Leopold Collection presented in the exhibition as well as important external loans.

Fin-de-sie`cle Vienna remains a central event in the birth of this century's modern culture. This text offers alternative ways of understanding the subject, through the concept of 'critical modernism' and the integration of previously neglected subjects.

This exceptional volume brings together nearly 1,000 images representing the diversity and richness of the visual arts in Vienna at the turn of the 20th century. At the turn of the 20th century, Vienna became an epicenter for new thought, increasingly running counter to the prevalent conservatism symbolized by the neo-classical facades of the buildings in the city’s Ringstrasse. During the time of the modernist movement led by Gustav Klimt, Josef Hoffmann, and Koloman Moser, among others, a multidisciplinary environment emerged in which music, writing, and intellectual thought flourished, bringing different arts together in a “Gesamtkunstwerk” a total work of art. Covering all artistic fields, from painting to photography, the Wiener Werkstatte and decorative arts, fashion and architecture of fin-de-siecle Vienna and including biographies for featured artists, Vienna 1900 Complete is an unprecedented compilation of richly colored images curated and authored in a single volume by three leading scholars of the period.

Vienna and its Secessionist movement at the turn of the last century is the focus of this extraordinary social portrait told through an eminent Viennese family, headed by Hermine and Moriz Gallia, who were among the great patrons of early-twentieth-century Viennese culture at its peak. Good Living Street takes us from the Gallias’ middle-class prosperity in the provinces of central Europe to their arrival in Vienna, following the provision of Emperor Franz Joseph in 1848 that gave Jews freedom of movement and residence, legalized their religious services, opened public service and professions up to them, and allowed them to marry. The Gallias, like so many hundreds of thousands of others, came from across the Hapsburg Empire to Vienna, and for the next two decades the city that became theirs was Europe’s center of art, music, and ideas. The Gallias lived beyond the Ringstrasse in Vienna’s Fourth District on the Wohllebengasse (translation: Good Living Street), named after Vienna’s first nineteenth-century mayor. In this extraordinary book we see the amassing of the Gallias’ rarefied collections of art and design; their cosmopolitan society; we see their religious life and their efforts to circumvent the city’s rampant anti-Semitism by the family’s conversion to Catholicism along with other prominent intellectual Jews, among them Gustav Mahler. While conversion did not free Jews from anti-Semitism, it allowed them to secure positions otherwise barred to them. Two decades later, as Kristallnacht raged and Vienna burned, the Gallias were having movers pack up the contents of their extraordinary apartment designed by Josef Hoffmann. The family successfully fled to Australia, bringing with them the best private collection of art and design to escape Nazi Austria; included were paintings, furniture, three sets of silver cutlery, chandeliers, letters, diaries, books and bookcases, furs—chinchilla, sable, sealskin—and even two pianos, one upright and one Steinway. Not since the publication of Carl Schorske’s acclaimed portrait of Viennese modernism, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, has a book so brilliantly—and completely—given us this kind of close-up look at turn-of-the-last-century Viennese culture, art, and daily life—when the Hapsburg Empire was fading and modernism and a new order were coming to the fore. Good Living Street re-creates its world, atmosphere, people, energy, and spirit, and brings it all to vivid life.

This opulent production on Viennese modernism features epoch-making paintings and precious objects from the most important artists, architects, furniture designers and craftspeople.