Wth Waerndorfer’s financial backing, Moser constructed possibly his greatest contribution to the aesthetic world in 1903, partnering with architect Josef Hoffmann to found an extraordinarily ambitious multidisciplinary design studio.

Three years later he expanded his new practice to his own home, an all-encompassing experiment with interior design that seems to have been undocumented, but must have been impressive, as it earned him the patronage of the absurdly wealthy and forward thinking cotton baron Fritz Waerndorfer. It was a mission Moser tackled with unblinking sincerity.Ī year after the succession Moser had already applied his artistic eye to product design, releasing his first collection of decor, including hand knotted rugs and cushion covers. They would reconnect Vienna’s closed, nationalistic art scene to the global art world, bring art out of public buildings and back into people’s homes, and rebirth the mundane world into shimmering aesthetic perfection. On April 3rd, 1897 Moser was one of 40 artists and architects who delivered a letter to the Association of Austrian Artists declaring the foundation of a new group, the Vienna Secession. This was the wave that Moser was poised to ride, but with such energy it seems he lifted tectonic plates and pushed the wave forward himself. Together they controlled public commissions in a monopoly critic Hermann Bahr described as “peddlers who pass for artists and have a commercial interest that prevents art from flourishing.”īut outside the establishment, young artists were agitating for a new kind of art production, a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total practice, unifying high art with craft.

Similar to the near total dominance of the Paris Salon, Vienna’s art world was held in a stranglehold by the Association of Austrian Artists and the single municipal venue for exhibition, the Kunstlerhaus. Let’s back up-Vienna was one of two capital cities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a bastion of conservative politics and culture while the rest of Europe exploded with industrialization. But creative engines need something to spin, and Moser found his focal point in Vienna’s cafe’s and bars, where the city’s young artists were hatching a plan. Moser not only balanced these disciplines but thrived, an early hint that Koloman was a powerhouse. Born in 1868 and raised in Vienna during a decades-long period of artistic conservatism, Moser balanced painting studies at the city’s Academy of Fine Arts with commercial illustration to support his family after his father’s death in 1888. Like many of the great figures who emerge from convulsive shifts in the art world, Moser was in the right place at the right time. His pictorial repertoire contained landscapes and symbolic compositions as some of his favorite subjects, in addition to decorative floral motifs such as the work at hand.What would the world look like if everything was special? If all the things that are mass produced for innocuous consumption were reimagined with the creativity and craft of the world’s greatest artists? This was Koloman Moser’s vision, and in fifty short years he made it real, transforming what it meant to make at the dawn of the 20th century. Onward from 1907, Moser turned increasingly toward painting and designing stage sets.

Together with Josef Hoffmann and the industrialist Fritz Waerndorfer, he founded the Wiener Werkstätte in 1903. In 1899 Moser was appointed as a teacher at Vienna’s School of Applied Arts and was given the position of professor of decorative painting and drawing a year later in 1900. He also produced about 140 illustrations for the Secession’s magazine Ver Sacrum, which was published between 18. Using a groundbreakingly modern approach, Moser went on to design the spatial concept of more than half of the exhibitions organized at the Secession until 1905. One of the most influential figures of the Secession, Koloman Moser is counted amongst the many artists who, along with Gustav Klimt, left the Künstlerhaus in 1897 to establish the Vienna Secession.

Koloman moser 13th vienna secession