Hagenbund

The Hagenbund operated for almost a decade in the shadow of the popular and successful Secession, and only in the years that followed the damaging resignation of the Klimt Group from the Secession did its members succeed in developing a more moderate, independent line, in which atmosphere played a major role.

Among its members during this period were Theodore Fried, Oskar Laske, Anton Hanak, Carry Hauser, Georg Mayer-Marton, Georg Merkel [de], Sergius Pauser, Fritz Schwarz-Waldegg, Otto Rudolf Schatz, Albin Egger-Lienz and Oskar Kokoschka.

They may have approved of the Expressionists’ search for realism, but the expressive formal solutions they found conflicted with the Hagenbund’s own artistic objectives.

In March 1938, a few days after the Anschluss of Austria into the German Reich, the administration of both the Hagenbund and the Secession were brought into in to line with the thinking of the Nazi party by existing members of the respective organisation.

These included Edgar Degas, Josef Dobrowsky, Raoul Dufy, Lyonel Feininger, Gerhart Frankl, Sebastian Isepp, Oskar Kokoschka, Jacques Lipchitz, Adolf Loos, Henri Matisse, Edvard Munch, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, Pablo Picasso, Auguste Renoir, Auguste Rodin, and Ferdinand Georg Waldmuller[4] These were female artists who from 1924 onwards could participate in discussions and exhibit their paintings, but had no right to vote.