Viennese Waltz

Designer Arthur Arbesser pays homage to one of the Austrian greats and art nouveau designer Koloman Moser with a collection inspired by and representing his motifs.

- Melody Thomas

In 1918, as burns and wounds from the World War I were still felt across Europe, Vienna wept not only for the inhumanity that this war of wars brought, but also the loss of a quarter of its most esteemed representatives: painter and inventor Gustav Klimt, expressionist Egon Schiele, architect and urbanist Otto Wagner and graphic designer Koloman Moser.

Precursor of European avant-garde movements, Viennese Secession was born the day Klimt and Moser quit the Association of Austrian Artists to establish a new association of artists, representative of a different movement in art. Of which Klimt became founder and president, with the role of advocating art in its entirety, from painting to architecture, sculpture and music. At the time, Vienna was the centre of European intellectual thought and lifestyle.

“In London, Paris and Berlin (…), active intellectuals from different cultural fields (…) rarely interacted with one another. They lived in professional spaces which were relatively compartmentalised. On the contrary, in Vienna, the cohesion of all the elite was maintained, to a certain degree, up until 1900,” explains renowned historian Carl Emil Schorske in his book Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture published in 1979.