The Female Secession is a welcome addition to the growing literature on women artists and their contributions to the creativity of Vienna 1900 and the interwar years. With her focus on the Art School for Women and Girls (1897–1936), Megan Brandow-Faller presents fascinating new material that demonstrates how art schools disseminate ideas. She tells a unique story that follows the careers of alumni who became art activists, defending the principles of interdisciplinarity that they learned in an art school that was both artistically and socially progressive. Among the school founders were feminist Rosa Mayreder (1858–1938) and the art critic Adalbert F. Seligmann (1862–1945), who served as the school's first director.
The Female Secession is the first monograph devoted to the school; the belated attention is due to reasons that go beyond the usual gender bias and erasures of the Holocaust. The author stresses that the historiographic privileging of the fine arts over craft-based media has impacted the reception of these artists and the institution (4). Another factor, and this is what makes her contribution so valuable, can be found in the myths about creativity that have prevailed since the onset of Romanticism. These have located genius in the artist, rather than in academic training. But art schools are where ideas are disseminated and where networks are formed. The fact that art academies denied women admission in most of Europe until well into the twentieth century meant a loss of opportunities to access professional networks. The Art School for Women and Girls was founded to rectify this social injustice. Through faculty connections to the Klimt group, the school was able to pioneer one of the greatest classroom-to-careers experiments of all time. In page after page, the reader encounters examples of student artworks that are not only stunning but were also exhibited in elite venues like the Kunstschau 1908 and published in Ver Sacrum (50–51), Die Fläche (The Surface), and as Wiener Werkstätte postcards (70). Art critics Ludwig Hevesi and Amelia S. Levetus took heed and wrote about their works in their columns in prominent art journals and newspapers. This all happened while they were still enrolled as students. The author, who wrote her dissertation on women's art education in Vienna 1900, unpacks the curriculum in a detailed exposition never before seen, showing how innovative pedagogical methods helped students achieve aesthetic breakthroughs. The school became a center for modernist experimentation, with a “radically permissive” and “anti-academic” curriculum that promoted “creative experimentation and individual expressivity” (7). Tina Blau (1845–1916) led students on field trips to the Prater in her popular landscape painting course (34). Secessionist Adolf Böhm (1873–1941) employed some of the same teaching innovations (stencils and collaging cut and pasted papers) that were later practiced at the Bauhaus. This discovery alone should be of interest for historians of twentieth-century art, which Brandon Taylor has called the “century of collage,” locating the beginning of the collage revolution in Picasso's Paris studio (Collage: The Making of Modern Art [London, 2006]). Part of a vernacular tradition, the practice of collaging cut and pasted papers was introduced into Vienna's official art world well before the Cubists, who first displayed collages publicly in 1912, still considered a radical act by art historians. We learn in Brandow-Faller's exposition that students in Vienna were already experimenting with cutting and pasting papers—it was a way for students to learn how to translate three dimensions into planar shapes and to organise their compositions to emphasise the decorative “surface.”
The book gets its title from art historian Hans Ankwicz-Kleehoven (1883–1962), who called the split in the Women Artists’ Association (1910–) another “secession” in his 1927 review of the inaugural exhibition (2). Art school alumni had seceded to form their own women's collective, the “Wiener Frauenkunst,” to defend the Secessionist ideal of multidisciplinarity. The book title captures much more than a minor comment from a newspaper column. Brandow-Faller provides ample evidence that female students participated in creating the Secessionist style before the war. The illustrations play a crucial role in her exegesis. Although some of these works may have been seen by specialists in other contexts because they were published in elite journals, these works have never been contextualised so carefully. Indeed, they were part of an art school experiment. The Böhm school in particular served as “an experimental field of abstract surface design of utmost importance to the artists and critics of the Klimt Group. Artists connected to the school became the Wiener Werkstätte's most celebrated interwar designers” (7). These “Mehrfachkünstlerinnen,” as Brandow-Faller prefers to refer to these artists, were able to master more than one discipline/medium. Some specialized in Raumkunst, the art of spatial arrangement.
In the first half of the book, Brandow-Faller analyzes the discourse that centered around the “untutored female” students, notions of primitivism, and the decorative. She explains how lingering notions of dilettantism were sometimes conflated with ideas about primitivism and biased attitudes toward female students who engaged in modernist experimentation. Modernist teachers like Böhm admired the child-like and the “primitive” while more conservative artists, like school director Seligmann, were entirely sceptical about the quality of works that embraced primitivist tendencies. The “decorative” was a slippery category inflected by gender, as the author explains, and it changed over time. It was once a positive term that referred to nascent abstraction, but became associated with the non-essential add-on, pejoratively gendered as feminine in an aesthetic value system. Complicating things, Vienna was an early centre for debates on the decorative. In a chapter titled “Decorative Trouble,” we learn that these tensions were behind the rift that led to the “female Secession” in 1926 (159).
The author concludes her book by connecting the legacy of the school and its alumni to the 1970s feminist Pattern and Decoration movement, which subversively poked fun at notions of purity, autonomy, and abstraction, the basic hallmarks of Modernism as described by Clement Greenberg. But couldn't we argue that the school's legacy is part of a much broader historiography, as the author herself does in her introduction? The discipline of art history is rightly under revision for how it examines craft-based media and “materiality,” a field that Michael Yonan has theorized and whose work Brandow-Faller also cites as an inspiration for her methods (15). The Female Secession arrives at a time when US scholars are paying close attention to art schools like the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College as sites of networking that provide more inclusive frameworks for reexamining the structures of art history. Helen Molesworth, for example, reinstalled the permanent collection at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles to acknowledge the role of art schools like Black Mountain College in disseminating ideas; in her curatorial logic, works by women or media associated with craft materials were suddenly no longer marginalized in the story of modern art. Were women, fiber arts, and other craft-based media always present at forward-looking art schools like the Bauhaus and Black Mountain but subject to erasure because of the biased ways in which we tell the story of art? Brandow-Faller's book provides plenty of evidence to suggest that yes, indeed they were, and very early on. And she is not alone. In the most recent 2023 Belvedere/Van Gogh Museum exhibition devoted to Gustav Klimt, Margaret Macdonald Mackintosch's embroidered panels were highlighted as one of his inspirations. Rolf Laven and Alexander Klee are also among the scholars who have contributed to a growing interest in the role of art education; the Belvedere has highlighted their research in exhibitions on Kineticism (Vienna, 1911) and Cubism, Constructivism, Form Art (Vienna, 2016), where many of the toys discussed in The Female Secession were displayed. Diana Reynolds Cordileone has pioneered research on the question of how state-sponsored craft education disseminated ideas and even participated in “inventing traditions”; between the 1870s and 1900 there was an increase from fewer than a dozen to over two hundred craft-related schools in the Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy (Alois Riegl in Vienna 1875–1905 [Burlington, 2013], 116). Brandow-Faller's book arrives at crucial time in this changing historiography; she is not merely adding women artists to the picture but also looking closely at craft-based media as they were practiced and disseminated in and through a progressive art school.
The ideals of multidisciplinarity were practiced in Vienna before they were taught at the Bauhaus, as Brandow-Faller ably demonstrates. She proposes that the Art School for Women and Girls was a “seedbed for the same pedagogical ideals more famously cultivated by the secessionist faculty at the KGS (School of Applied Arts)” and that it “deserves to emerge from the shadow of the Bauhaus myth” (28). The Bauhaus was born in Vienna, and it in turn fed Black Mountain College with émigré faculty who introduced Bauhaus concepts in what became a fundamentally interdisciplinary curriculum. This is the history that has won, at least in terms of art school practice today, and is part of the wider legacy of Vienna 1900 and its lesser-known history of women's participation in its creativity. The Female Secession will hopefully inspire further studies about its individual students whose stories have been relegated to minor roles in this broadly compelling history.
