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Biographical note about the author [page 184]:
 
OTTO WAGNER 1841-1918 - BIOGRAPHIC DATA
 
The few details known of Otto Wagner's personal life shed some light on his artistic development. Having lost his father at the age of five, Wagner was raised by his mother, described by several biographers as a forceful and stern disciplinarian who left an indelible impression on his life. For his preparatory schooling, Wagner claimed to have attended the prestigious Akademisches Gymnasium in Vienna and the Benedictine Stiftsgymnasium at Kremsmunster, but these facts have recently been challenged. A boyhood friendship with the architect Theophil von Hansen may have steered his interests into architecture. His attendance at the architectural academies in Berlin and Vienna were the requisite steps for anyone aspiring to the upper echelons of the profession.
 
Wagner's first marriage to Josephine Domhart was anything but a happy one. It ended in divorce in 1880 with a daughter Susanne, and two illegitimate sons born to Sophie von Paupie, neither of whom Wagner adopted. However, the immediate cause of the marriage's dissolution was Wagner's intense affair with his daughter's young governess, Louise Stiffel. Wagner married her in Budapest in 1884, and again in Vienna in 1889; they remained inseparable until her death.
 
Wagner's relationship with Stiffel, and his mother's death in 1880 may have brought about the turning point of his artistic career. His designs during the 1880s, beginning with the "Artibus" project, disclose a new ambition and concern for international fame. His burgeoning artistic reputation culminated with his appointment to the chair at the Vienna Academy in 1894. By this date, Wagner had well established himself as one of the leading and most influential architects in Austria and Germany.
 
Wagner's executed works in 1894 consisted of a synagogue in Budapest, two banks, and numerous apartment buildings in Vienna, and his first designs for the many stations and bridges of Vienna's municipal rail system (Stadtbahn). He had participated in several international competitions with some success, and his renderings and sketches for uncommissioned projects had been exhibited and applauded in Berlin and Munich. Yet the monumental commissions that generally would have followed such a promotion as his academic appointment never materialized. The radically modern program that he introduced at the Academy, together with his resignation from the Kunstlerhaus a few years later, fomented a schism or professional disaffection that erupted after 1900 into a rather brutal artistic war. Aligned with the Secession, and with Gustav Klimt in the dispute over the latter's ceiling paintings at the University of Vienna, Wagner also began to encounter bitter opposition to his own designs during these years. His inability between 1900 and 1912 to realize the building of any of his schemes for the city's new historical museum effectively ended his public career and credibility as an architect in Vienna. Increasingly alienated, he withdrew to Louise for solace; after her death in 1915 he retreated into a private artistic world. Wagner died in 1918 in virtual isolation.
 
H.F.M.