Between 1987 and 1932, the Vienna Secession and the Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshop) served as magnets for Austria's avant garde. Unlike modernists in other European countries, these Austrians shared no concrete stylistic program, but rather were united by their belief in the Gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork): a completely coordinated visual environment. Although the Gesamtkunstwerk's proponents anticipated many aspects of modern design, their underlying ideology was essentially conservative. The architect Josef Hoffmann and the designer Koloman Moser, collaborators at the Secession and co-founders of the Wiener Werkstätte, wanted to recapture the aesthetic values of the pre-industrial era, to make whole a world that seemed to be fragmenting. Vienna's artists and artisans were engaged in a communal project aspiring to offer nothing less than spiritual redemption.

The attempt to impose order on an inherently messy and therefore frightening world is as old as the history of human thought. Religion, science and political theory all address this universal need, which has found concrete manifestations in such man-made structures as cathedrals, universities and nation-states. However, inasmuch as true unity can never be achieved, all ordering attempts are utopian, representing an ideal rather than a reality. The Gesamtkunstwerk, combining this utopian quest for unity with a romantic belief in the artist as quasi-spiritual leader, gathered force due to the socio-economic upheavals of the nineteenth century. Industrialization has undermined traditional crafts by separating the process of manufacture from that of design, while increasingly specialized technical disciplines fostered the sense that aesthetic effects were becoming unnaturally isolated from one another. The German composer Richard Wagner, who established the theoretical underpinnings of the Gesamtkunstwerk in a series of essays written between 1849 and 1851, believed that unity could only be regained if artists learned to master several skills or, alternatively, if they subordinated themselves to a single overriding concept. Wagnerian opera, melding drama, literature, music, set design and so forth, was an attempt to resolve this problem.

In the visual arts, architecture was the mother of the Gesamtkunstwerk, and one of the first Austrian manifestations of that concept may be seen in the string of public edifices built along Vienna's Ringstrasse in the late nineteenth century. Echoing the unity of conception found in Gothic cathedrals, these structures were decorated with monumental interior murals, and while no single maestro called the shots, common recourse to historical styles and motifs served as a coordinating filter. Gustav Klimt, named president of the Vienna Secession upon its founding in 1897, had made his early reputation painting historicist murals for such Ringstrasse monuments as the Burgtheater and the Kunsthistorisches Museum. However, his final Ringstrasse commission, paintings of the faculties of medicine, jurisprudence and philosophy for the University of Vienna, heralded a notable change in approach. Shedding the trappings of historicism, Klimt not only left the allegorical figures in his University paintings disturbingly naked, he stripped the faculties in question of any pretense to redemptive efficacy, The implication that artists, by shining their insightful light on the dark realities of human existence, offered the only hope of salvation was made even more explicit in the Secession's iconography, while the Secession's journal, Ver Sacrum (Sacred Spring) proclaimed a new age of spiritual and artistic renewal.

The totalizing tendencies of the Secession were manifested both in its evangelical mission and in its attempt to achieve a synthesis of multiple art forms. Not only paintings, but also architects and designers were admitted to the organization. “We recognize no difference between high art and low art,” the Secessionists declared in Ver Sacrum. “All art is good.” A pronounced interest in the applied arts was expressed in the type of work shown at the Secession as well as in the care lavished on customized installations. The Secession's most ambitious and successful Gesamtkunstwerk was its 1902 exhibition devoted to Ludwig van Beethoven. This multi-media presentation included interior design, sculpture, graphics, painting and music, but the best remembered contribution was probably Klimt's raised frieze, which encapsulated the reigning artistic philosophy with unparalleled concision. Quoting Schiller's “Ode to Joy” (the poem set to music in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony) in the mural's final, redemptive panel, Klimt proclaimed his solidarity with the poet and the composer as emissaries of aesthetic deliverance.

The philosophy of the Gesamtkunstwerk was unabashedly elitist: the self-anointed would lead, all others must follow. And though the Secession ostensibly comprised a community of like-minded individuals, its members were not particularly inclined to democratic compromise. In 1905, friction between the Secession's more traditional easel painters and the Gesamtkunstwerk devotees caused the latter group (including Klimt, Hoffmann and Moser) to walk out en masse. The Wiener Werkstätte, established in 1903, now became the sole institution uniting Austria's more advanced artists. While painters such as Klimt and, a bit later, the Expressionists Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele were drawn into its orbit, the Werkstätte was first and foremost a design collective. As a result, the organization's interpretation of the Gesamtkunstwerk was less introspective, more practical and expansive than had been the case at the Secession.

The Wiener Werkstätte saw its mandate as nothing less than the revamping of Austria's entire physical environment. Going beyond the theoretical leveling of art and craft that had been incorporated in the Secession's program, the Werkstätte extended its reach to a comprehensive array of domestic perquisites, produced either within its own workshops or under license to outside manufacturers. Hoffmann's architectural practice formed the organization's initial base, but the Werkstätte's employees (including Hoffmann and Moser) were polymaths, producing designs in a multitude of different categories. Typography and the graphic arts served as stylistic lynchpins, giving visual cohesion to the workshop's products and advertising.

In tandem with its creative program, the Wiener Werkstätte's approach to marketing was shaped by Gesamtkunstwerk principles, for the leaders' ideal of an aesthetic community extended not just to their constituent artists and artisans, but also to their audience. Winning a broad following was never the goal. The maintenance of high standards in quality of design, materials and workmanship meant that most Wiener Werkstätte creations were too costly for the masses. Furthermore, the creation of a Gesamtkunstwerk required that customers purchase the full product line, rather than just a stray item here or there. Financially and ideologically, the Werkstätte was sustained by clients who were prepared to make a total commitment. As Mäda Primavesi, daughter of one of the Wiener Werkstätte's principal backers, put it, the idea “was not just to buy paintings or sculpture, but to live the life humanly, intellectually, socially.”

Because the Wiener Werkstätte espoused no specific aesthetic program, it passed through a number of diverse stylistic phases in its twenty-nine-year history. The leading architects of the period, including Hoffmann, Emil Hoppe, Marcel Kammerer, Josef Olbrich and Otto Schönthal, had studied with Otto Wagner, who combined a profound grounding in classical precepts with a taste for Art Nouveau ornamentation. By 1903, however, the use of Art Nouveau tendrils and curves was fading, as Hoffmann and his colleagues began to focus more intently on principles of construction, proportion and integrity in the use of materials. Influenced in part by Moser's flair for graphic stylization, the early designs of the Wiener Werkstätte were severe and predominantly rectilinear. Geometric patterning seemed the ideal way to merge form, function and construction. Gitterwerk—utilitarian vessels constructed of sheet metal stamped with a latticework pattern—may be considered the signature item of this period. Curves, a natural concomitant of the bentwood manufacturing process, were seen mainly in the chairs produced under license by the firms of Thonet and J. & J. Kohn. Architectural commissions, such as the Purkersdorf Sanatorium (1904-05), reflected a similar austerity of conception.

This early purist phase, in many respects the Wiener Werkstätte's most forward-looking stylistic incarnation, did not last long. Hoffmann's love of refined detailing led him to explore increasingly more sumptuous surfaces made of rare woods and multicolored marbles. These were used to maximum effect in the Werkstätte's greatest Gesamtkunstwerk, a mansion built for the Belgian industrialist Adolf Stoclet between 1905 and 1911. Moser's relationship with Hoffmann was becoming strained, and as a result, new influences came to the fore. In 1907, at around the same time that Moser left the Wiener Werkstätte, the organization began distributing the work of the Wiener Keramik, a ceramics studio run by the potter Michael Powolny and the graphic designer Berthold Löffler. Powolny/Löffler ceramics, adorned by ornamental curlicues and playful putti, in some ways represented the antithesis of early Wiener Werkstätte purism.

A new predilection for bold colors and playful figuration manifested itself in the Wiener Werkstätte's next Gesamtkunstwerken, the Cabaret Fledermaus (1907) and the 1908 Kunstschau. Both were public spaces: the one an intimate dinner-theater, the other a massive exhibition complex that included not just displays of avant-garde art and design, but a garden, a stage, a café and even a mock cemetery and mock church. Whereas Löffler's Kunstschau graphics were bright and cheery, the young artist Oskar Kokoschka contributed a poster and illustrated book that hinted at a completely different direction. The reintroduction of figuration ultimately created a choice between truly delving into the human condition or papering it over. Expressionists such as Kokoschka and Egon Schiele would pursue the former path, while the Wiener Werkstätte became trapped in a process of aesthetic denial. Since eliminating the darker forces explored by Klimt in the university paintings and the Beethoven frieze, the Gesamtkunstwerk had become little more than a rarefied form of escapism.

Prior to World War I, the Gesamtkunstwerk evolved from the collusion of the Austrian avant garde with a community of well-to-do patrons who at the time had every reason to consider their wealth inexhaustible. It is, nevertheless, also possible that the escapist aspects of the Gestamtkunstwerk reflected a subliminal premonition that this wealth was built upon shaky foundations. After World War I, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was dismantled, and the economic structure that had sustained the Wiener Werkstätte slowly collapsed. With few clients able or willing to commission grand mansions, the Werkstätte attempted to expand its retail operations, opening shops in Marienbad and Zurich in 1917, New York in 1921, Velden in 1922 and Berlin in 1929. Parceling out its vision piecemeal in this fashion, of course, was antithetical to the Werkstätte's original, totalizing mandate. Yet at the same time that the organization endeavored to reach a wider audience, Hoffmann railed against the very measures that would have permitted it to do so effectively. Unlike the German Bauhaus, which had embraced industrial production, the Werkstätte remained committed to a crafts ethic—perhaps more so after the war than previously. As a result, its products remained out of reach of the masses, even as postwar shortages forced the workshop to focus on less costly materials such as ceramics, wood and beads. Whereas the prewar Wiener Werkstätte had welcomed innovation, it now retreated into a kind of aggressive provincialism. Painted glassware evoked the Biedermeier period; pottery was given rough, peasantry glazes and adorned with folksy motifs. Decorative objects that were not quite art or functional craft, such as Wally Wieselthier's ceramic figurines and Dagobert Peche's silver fantasies, proliferated in the 1920s. The quest for the Gesamtkunstwerk, hoping to combine the grand ideals of “high” art with the utilitarian practicality of the “low,” ended up generating works that served neither end particularly well.

In 1932, after several brushes with bankruptcy, the Wiener Werkstätte closed its doors for good. Despite its ultimate demise, however, the Werkstätte left a powerful legacy. In addition to anticipating the meshing of form, function and construction intrinsic to modern design, the Gesamtkunstwerk concept has done much to shape the way we relate to objects. The creation of a cohesive “look”—from Donna Karan separates to Ralph Lauren home furnishings—has by now become a given of the upscale lifestyle to which many Americans aspire. Global capitalism and a highly evolved advertising industry provide our contemporary design moguls with a breadth and reach that Hoffmann, in his wildest dreams, could never have anticipated. The premium charged for design and marketing, above and beyond the raw cost of manufacture, has become enormous today, when both discount sneakers and $150 Nikes are produced in the same Filipino sweatshops. To be sure, this is not the preindustrial Eden imagined by the Wiener Werkstätte's founders, and present-day design sensibilities are more eclectic, less philosophically charged, than the early twentieth-century Gesamtkunstwerk. Yet objects continue to provide comfort in times of uncertainty, and the attempt to find comprehensive solutions remains seductive, even though we should know that such schemes never really work.

The sweep of the Gesamtkunstwerk was so broad that the present exhibition could not have been realized without the generous assistance of a great many collectors and colleagues. We would like to express our deepest thanks to all who contributed to this show, including Joh. Backhausen & Söhne Interior Design, Vienna; Merrill C. Berman; Tim Chu; Dr. Martin Eidelberg; the Shapiro Estate; Fred Silberman; Thomas Stewart; the Wärndorfer Family and several anonymous collectors.