Fifty or so artists with a different sensibility and a common determination: to be free of the bourgeois morality and its obsolete traditions. To break with the classicism of the Austro-Hungarian Empire on its decline. The Vienna Secession, founded in 1897, would shape a distinctive form of art in Vienna and all over the world. Gustav Klimt paints his own dreams; poet Hugo Hofmannsthal pens librettos for composer Richard Strauss; Otto Wagner and Josef Hoffman invent design; compatriot Sigmund Freud studies the interpretation of dreams; the young Egon Schiele studies painting and drawing. It's from this atmosphere of artistic, intellectual, and political effervescence that a world is born, notably through the search of a global art which evokes more particularly this wander through the Vienna of 1900.

Francois Baudot is a journalist and writer, and a main reporter for Elle magazine. He has written numerous books on decorative arts, and his other titles in the Assouline Fashion Mémoire series are Alaïa, Chanel, Christian Lacroix, Thierry Mugler,Poiret, Elsa Schiaparelli and Yoshi Yamamoto.