The Secession's most dramatic decline in fortunes occurred at virtually the same time that Jugendstil fell out of style elsewhere in Europe. The Vienna Secession's work is often referred to (during the years before World War I) as the Austrian version of Jugendstil, the German term for Art Nouveau, and it is the work of its members in association with that style that has contributed most to its fame, particularly outside of Austria.It literally consisted of a set of artists who broke away from the association that ran the city's own venue for contemporary art to form their own, progressive group along with a venue to display their work. The Vienna Secession was created as a reaction to the conservatism of the artistic institutions in the Austrian capital at the end of the 19 th century.

Nonetheless, even today the Secession remains a key forum in Austria for the promotion and discourse surrounding contemporary art. Before long, however, internal divisions and difficulties arising from the commercial side of the Secessionists' work ultimately fractured the group's monopoly on the scene for contemporary and decorative arts. The Secessionists' work provides in large part the visual representations of the new intellectual and cultural flowering of Vienna around 1900, in fields as diverse as medicine, music, and philosophy. This, in concert with their official journal Ver Sacrum, not only introduced the Austrian capital to their work, but that of contemporary and historical art movements on a global scale. Led at the beginning by Gustav Klimt, the Secessionists gave contemporary art its first dedicated venue in the city. It was the coalescence of the first movement of artists and designers who were committed to a forward-thinking, internationalist view of the art world, all-encompassing in its embrace and integration of genres and fields, and - highly idealistically - freed from the dictates of entrenched values or prevailing commercial tastes. The formation of the Vienna Secession in 1897 marked, quite accurately, the formal beginning of modern art in Austria - a nation at the time noted for its attachment to a highly conservative tradition.

The vienna secession artists