Koloman Moser

Koloman Moser is filed among painters, but his real trade was designing more or less everything a person could look at. In 1897 he helped found the Vienna Secession, the breakaway group of Austrian artists who wanted to pull art out of the stuffy academies, and he designed its posters, its magazine and parts of its famous white exhibition hall.

A few years later he and the architect Josef Hoffmann started the Wiener Werkstatte, a workshop that made furniture, jewellery, glass and silver to a single clean, geometric taste. Moser drew postage stamps, banknotes and stained-glass windows for a church on the edge of Vienna, treating a chair or a stamp with the same care a painter gives a canvas.

Only late did he turn seriously to painting on its own. He died of throat cancer in 1918, one of several major Viennese artists, among them Klimt and Schiele, that the city lost in that single year.