VIENNA.- Around 1900, the Habsburg capital of Vienna was a cultural and artistic melting pot. The city was also a hothouse of salons, artists’ circles, and coffeehouses, as well as a centre of refined taste and the culture of decadence, sensuality, and graceful beauty. With its exhibition on the colour woodcut in Vienna ca. 1900, the Albertina is dedicating itself to a hitherto little-noted chapter of Viennese Art Nouveau with around 100 outstanding works from its own collection. This period saw artists including Carl Moll, Emil Orlik, and Koloman Moser rediscover one of the world’s oldest printing techniques—that of the colour woodcut—entirely anew: with their emphasis on outlines, on the stylisation of motifs, and on the interplay of contrasting hues, these artists’ colour woodcuts were thoroughly in keeping with the new formal ideals of the Art Nouveau style and soon became popular items for collectors.

Whether Sigmund Freud, Arthur Schnitzler, Gustav Klimt, Adolf Loos, or Karl Kraus—the prominent protagonists around 1900 in this metropolis on the Danube were multifaceted and numerous. This mix was catalysed by the unique enthusiasm for intellectual exchange between literature, music, theatre, and the fine arts to be found in this period’s bourgeois salons and alternative artists’ circles. Authors, writers, artisans, architects, journalists, and philosophers were closely networked, a phenomenon in which the Viennese social institution of the coffeehouse played no small role.

The Secession’s Pioneering Role
The Union of Austrian Artists – Secession was an exceptional example of this unique artistic density in Vienna around 1900 and simultaneously the wellspring of Viennese Art Nouveau. Upon their split with the Künstlerhaus in 1897, the Secessionists—led by Gustav Klimt— broke with the retrograde Historicist style of the Ringstraße era and opened themselves to modernism. All genres were placed on an equal footing, in correspondence with the notion that art should permeate all of life. The Secession quickly became Vienna’s most influential artists’ organisation.

The development of the colour woodcut was one of the phenomena in which these artists played a special role: while Klimt himself did not work in the medium, other prominent Secessionists such as Carl Moll, Koloman Moser, and Maximilian Kurzweil took it to an unforeseen zenith of quality and status between 1900 and 1910. In their exhibition building just off Karlsplatz, the Secessionists held several widely noted exhibitions between 1900 and 1904 in which colour woodcut prints featured prominently. One highlight among Viennese exhibitions of this period was the 1908 Kunstschau, in which the entire Austrian colour woodcut scene took part.

Of equal importance in the establishment of the Viennese colour woodcut were periodicals: between 1898 and 1903, the Secessionists’ luxuriously produced magazine Ver Sacrum (Latin for “Sacred Spring”) published around 220 colour woodcuts, thereby disseminating Secessionist ideas in the form of sophisticated book art—albeit at a price that limited its reach to an elite audience. The magazine’s programmatic title refers to the Secessionists’ fresh start following the stagnation of the historicist period. And with its articles on art theory, practical demonstrations of the new aesthetic, and contributions by writers both Austrian and foreign, this cult magazine more than fittingly answered the call: To e ach age its art. To art its freedom.

The (Colour) Woodcut’s Rediscovery
Back then, the woodcut was anything but a new invention—its rise in prominence much rather embodied the rediscovery of one of the world’s oldest printing processes: in China, printing on paper had been done as early as the 4th century. And around 1500, Albrecht Dürer had brought the woodcut to a pinnacle of artistry in Europe. The decisive contribution to the genesis of the colour woodcut was made by Dürer’s contemporaries Lucas Cranach and Hans Burgkmair, along with Ugo da Carpi in Italy. But other techniques would soon supersede the woodcut, which was for a long time to be viewed merely as an obsolete means of reproduction until, during the 19th century, it was revived across large areas of Europe. The colour woodcut was then revolutionised by Edvard Munch, who opened up for it radical new expressive possibilities on the threshold to modernism.

In contrast to woodcuts in black-and-white, the colour woodcut requires artists to create an individual printing block for each colour; on each such block, the drawing appears in reverse. Its protruding lines and surfaces then print the image onto the paper in its intended orientation, while the cut-out areas leave no impression. The printing blocks are used one after the other to ultimately produce the finished image. The colours employed in the individual prints can be varied, for which reason some works have come down to us in differing versions.

This exhibition also covers techniques such as linocut printing, the results of which are often hardly distinguishable from that of the woodcut. And to cite two further examples: Jungnickel began developing a stencil spray technique in 1905, while 1907 saw Franz von Zülow receive a patent on his paper-cut printing method.

From Moll to Zülow
The artists featured in this exhibition are all given their own areas in order to facilitate intense concentration on the individual artistic personalities and their work: Carl Moll’s well-known urban views and Koloman Moser’s prints, stylised to emphasise surfaces, as well as original printing blocks by Maximilian Kurzweil are featured at the beginning. The selfconfident female figures by Carl Anton Reichel, also at the beginning of the exhibition, stand in stark contrast to the refined, beautifully drawn Art Nouveau women by other artists.

Central to this presentation are the magnificently coloured animals by Ludwig Heinrich Jungnickel: with his keen feel for shapes and motion, Jungnickel depicted animals such as big cats and birds in their respective defining qualities. His formally consummate animal depictions and experimental stencil-sprayed works comprise the exhibition’s main section. The theme of landscapes is also paid a great deal of attention: both the alpine impressions by Josef Stoitzner and the numerous images from Carl Moser’s travels employ a clear, reduced, and hence modern pictorial language.

The conclusion is provided by the expressive paper-cut prints of Franz von Zülow, whose naïve depictions of rural life take up the aesthetic of the colour woodcut but replace the wooden printing block with easier-to-work paper stencils.