Germany

Munich (Bavaria)

1892: The First Secession

At the end of the 19th century, Munich was an attractive place for German artists of every origin and style desiring to create something new. It was a young, modern, and exciting city allowing the artists to invent new styles. New art was noticed attentively and intensively, where it is to be mentioned that the Munich style often was of a playful nature and indeed based on traditional styles like historicism or baroque. And it is important to say that the German kind of Art Nouveau, the Jugendstil (style of the Youth), got its name by a cultural review published in Munich, the Jugend (Youth)..

Regarding the other secession movements in Europe, Munich also has historical merits because of the foundation of the Munich Secession in 1892 and of the creation of the avant-garde Vereinigte Werkstätten für Kunst im Handwerk (Unified Workshops for Art in Handicraft) in 1898. The city had become a meeting point for artists of any kind and any genius forming a sort of international Boheme of which the cultural and spiritual centre was in Schwabing, the former village on the border of the city. Around the central personage of the "prince of the artists" Franz von Stuck (1863-1928) were among many others August Endell (1871-1925), Hermann Obrist (1862-1927), Richard Riemerschmid (1868-1957), Bruno Paul (1874-1968), Leo Putz (1869-1940), Thomas Theodor Heine (1867-1948) as well as the great Jugendstil artist and architect Peter Behrens (1868-1940). The literary circle consisted mainly of Stefan George (1868-1933), Ludwig Thoma (1867-1921), Frank Wedekind (1864-1918), Karl Wolfskehl (1869-1948), Otto Julius Bierbaum (1865-1910), Thomas Mann (1875-1955) and Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926).
The arts and crafts in Munich created around 1900, the ceramics, the china, were in a positive manner popular, direct, and of beautiful and simple intention, rather of decorative and applied nature than fine arts. Besides arts and crafts, it was the graphical creation which brought the Munich Jugendstil far beyond the city's borders.

The Munich Secession

In April 1892, more than a hundred artists associated by founding the Verein bildender Künstler Münchens e. V. Secession (Association of fine artists in Munich Secession). It was a true and real secession since three quarters of them still were members of the Königlich-privilegierte Münchener Künstlergenossenschaft (MKG) (Privileged Royal Artists' Association of Munich) being under the "tyrannic" influence of the "painters' prince" Franz von Lenbach (1836-1904). In the Secession participated among many other famous artists Franz von Stuck, Peter Behrens, Max Liebermann (1847-1935) and Lovis Corinth (1858-1925); they refused the historicism propagated by the academies and wanted to create something new. One of their maxims, characteristic for Art Nouveau world-wide, was that art concerns the whole man and the whole social life.
Lenbach did anything he could by using his leading position and his influence upon the regent Luitpold and the minister of cultural affairs Müller to intrigue against the Avant-Garde, but nevertheless, in summer 1893, the first international exposition of the Secession took place. Lenbach's opponents were the collectioner of art and editor of the Jugend Georg Hirth, the socialist leader Georg von Vollmar and the count of Toerring-Jettenbach; their engagement for the secessionists resulted in official recognition of the young artists' search for new expressive possibilities.
Within the same year, another group of artists left the MKG and founded the "Luitpold group". In 1899, a group of painters all being in the staff of the Jugend" founded another artists association of the name Group G.
But far more important for the Munich Jugendstil than the Secession because influencing it in a decisive manner was the foundation of the Vereinigte Werkstätten für Kunst im Handwerk (Unified Workshops for Art in Handicraft) in 1898. Nonetheless, the Secession was in principle solidary with all new founded artists associations, and it still took some years before Berlin and Vienna should follow Munich's example.

Die Jugend (The Youth)

It was in January 1896 that the Munich editor Georg Hirth founded the review. It designed itself as a "Periodical for Art and Life" observing styles and developments of art at the end of the century especially in Germany, but also informing about graphical innovations abroad. Nearly every Jugendstil artist of Munich has worked sporadically or regularly for it.
Although the Jugend had nearly nothing to do with the origins and the developing of the Jugendstil, they will always remain tied together due the fact that the German Art Nouveau got its name from the review. Very famous became the vignettes of Otto Eckmann (1865-1902) and the coloured sheets of Hans Christiansen (1866-1945) which followed the slogan of the Jugend published in the first edition: "Anything that follows the traditional has to be excluded." The innovation and hardiness of the illustrations and the ornamentations had without any doubt a considerable influence on graphical and book printings in Germany at the end of the century.
Nonetheless it has to be mentioned that besides the impressioning artistic equipment, the contents of the Jugend were chosen far less carefully and everything that was supposed to meet the new public taste was published. Therefore, besides fresh, frivolous, and true art, you could also find sentimental, boring trashy things up to kitsch.

Vereinigte Werkstätten für Kunst im Handwerk
(Unified Workshops for Art in Handicraft)

Originally and in the first place, the rising of the Jugendstil is due to the decorative arts; so its development in Munich, too, is due to the foundation of the Vereinigte Werkstätten which took place in 1898 in course of the Exposition for Arts and Crafts demonstrating that many young artists, for a long time already, had worked on a revival of the crafts. The intellectual and artistic leader of the movement was Hermann Obrist.
Mainly two problems occupied the young artists: They had to learn the technical conditions of the handicraft, and, after accomplishing the artistic creation, had to make profit of it. For both these aims, the Vereinigte Werkstätten were founded. They bought the young artists' projects or supplied them orders for interior decorations which were afterwards executed by professional craftsmen or industry enterprises. Moreover, the art works were presented and offered to the public in permanent or temporary expositions, and often the artists got a percentage of the proceeds. So the artists were independent of economic problems and could devote their whole creation power to the development of a modern art of daily life. When the Vereinigte Werkstätten presented complete interior decorations at the World Exposition of 1900 in Paris, they had an enormous success.
Afterwards, the Werkstätten, in order to produce less expensive, founded their own manufactory, especially for cabinet-makers with smaller workshops for metal works, embroidery and weaving.
For many years, the Werkstätten were the centre of the most talented Munich artists of the modern commercial art. Besides the original founders, Hermann Obrist and F. A. O. Krüger (born 1875), there were especially Richard Riemerschmid, Bernhard Pankok (1872-1943), Bruno Paul and Paul Haunstein (1880-1944) influencing the characteristics of the art works of the Vereinigte Werkstätten.