The Secession: The Golden Cabbage

Why is it significant?

Stand on the pavement across the road and take in the strangest building in this part of Vienna: a white block, almost without windows, crowned by a ball of gilded leaves that glitters as if it had been dipped in honey. The Viennese took one look at it in 1898 and named it the golden cabbage.

Key Facts

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Stand on the pavement across the road and take in the strangest building in this part of Vienna: a white block, almost without windows, crowned by a ball of gilded leaves that glitters as if it had been dipped in honey. The Viennese took one look at it in 1898 and named it the golden cabbage. They still call it that... only now they say it with affection. Read the gold letters above the door: Der Zeit ihre Kunst, der Kunst ihre Freiheit. To every age its art, to art its freedom. That motto was a declaration of war. In 1897 a group of young painters and architects, with Gustav Klimt as their first president, walked out of the old artists' society on Karlsplatz, which they found stuffy and obsessed with selling. They called themselves the Secession, and the young architect Joseph Maria Olbrich gave them this temple within about a year. Inside there are no velvet salons and no gilded frames, just white walls, daylight pouring from above, and rooms that could be rebuilt for every show. Within a few years this little building had shown Vienna Japanese prints, the Glasgow designers around Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the paintings of Van Gogh. And the dome is a laurel tree: some three thousand gilded leaves, the plant of Apollo, of poets and of victory. The real treasure is downstairs. In 1902 the Secession staged an exhibition in honour of Beethoven, and Klimt painted a frieze around the walls of one room. It tells the story of humanity's longing for happiness: floating figures, a knight in golden armour, a monstrous giant with the body of an ape, and at the end a choir of angels and a couple locked in an embrace, Klimt's version of the Ode to Joy. At the opening, Gustav Mahler conducted his own arrangement of a passage from the Ninth Symphony. The frieze was meant to be destroyed after the show. Instead it was cut from the wall, sold, hidden through two wars, bought by the Austrian state in 1973 and returned here in 1986. And here is the final twist: the rebels' temple ended up on Austrian money. Look at the 50 cent euro coin, and there is the golden cabbage. Now cross towards the open square to the east, where two little green and gold pavilions stand at the edge of Karlsplatz.