Secession Building

The 1898 manifesto of Vienna's breakaway artists — a white Art Nouveau temple crowned with a gilded dome of laurel leaves (Viennese nicknamed it 'the golden cabbage'), built to house a new kind of art free from academic tradition. Above the door runs the movement's motto: 'To every age its art, to art its freedom.' In the basement hangs Gustav Klimt's monumental Beethoven Frieze, a Secession landmark in its own right. For visitors, it's a key pilgrimage of turn-of-the-century Vienna — both a striking building and the home of one of Klimt's great works, where the whole spirit of the Secession is distilled.