Secession Building

'To Every Age Its Art, To Art Its Freedom'. So reads the proclamation over the entrance to this building. And for the nineteen artists who founded the Secession movement, those words were nothing short of a mantra. As the name denotes, the Secessionists had had enough of the stuffy staidness of the Academy and so they decided to go it alone. Gustav Klimt was elected the first leader of the association, which included Austrians, Poles and other pioneering artists from across the Habsburg Empire. Needless to say, the crowning element was derided as a 'golden cabbage' by the group's detractors, but such is life! Klimt's famed 'Beethoven Frieze' can still be savoured downstairs, and a small exhition chronicles the history of the movement.