Secession 49. Ausstellung

This poster from 1918, short and to the point, advertises the 49th exhibition of the Vienna Secession group of artists. For the design, Secession member Egon Schiele went back to sketches and a painting that he had created the previous year. He placed himself reading at the head of an L-shaped table. Schiele is surrounded by his artist friends, emphasising the solidarity of the group. The scene is shown from an angle and from above; it is remarkably flat, without any surrounding context and with a distorted perspective. In earlier versions, the empty chair opposite Schiele was occupied by his mentor and founder of the Vienna Secession, the painter Gustav Klimt. However, Klimt had died just before the exhibition and no one could take his place at the table. By the end of 1918, Schiele’s chair was also empty. He died of Spanish flu at the age of 28, just a month before the end of the First World War, which had held the Viennese artists firmly in its grasp.