The Golden Cabbage

In 1897, nineteen artists walked out of the association that decided what Vienna got to see, and a year later this building was already standing.

 

It was designed by Joseph Maria Olbrich, a student of the architect Otto Wagner, and it was meant to be everything the official art palaces were not: white walls, a clean box, and on top a dome made of more than three thousand gilded laurel leaves. The Viennese were quick with their verdict and called that dome the golden cabbage, a nickname it has never managed to shake.

 

Above the entrance you can read the motto that sums up the whole movement: to every age its art, to art its freedom.

 

Down in the basement you still find the Beethoven Frieze that Gustav Klimt painted in 1902 for a single exhibition. He put it straight onto the wall, because the work was supposed to be torn down afterwards, and the reason it is still here is that a collector had the walls sawn out.

 

A few hundred metres further north stands the academy where most of these artists had trained.