Elegant, liberal, modern. In a dense rhizome, Vienna’s intelligentsia developed new ideas and, with exuberant creativity, permeated the very fabric of Viennese fin-de-siècle society. Their salons became meeting places for artists and culturally minded members of the business elite. Serving as crystallization points within a highly educated, curious, and cosmopolitan upper class, they brought people together and provided a cultivated setting for exchange. Yet it was not only ideas that circulated. Romantic entanglements were pursued, and marriages contracted.

One of the most distinguished salons was hosted by Friedrich Eckstein. Together with his wife Bertha, née Diener, the polymath—born into a prosperous Jewish bourgeois family—resided at the St. Genois Schlössl in Baden near Vienna. Frequent guests included Arthur Schnitzler, Karl Kraus, Adolf Loos, and Peter Altenberg. Schnitzler’s drama Das weite Land drew inspiration from the Eckstein villa in Baden; the Ecksteins’ son Percy provided the model for the eponymous figure in the play, while Friedrich Eckstein himself served as the prototype for “Gustl Wahl.”

From childhood onward, Friedrich Eckstein cultivated close connections with scientists, inventors, and writers. Through the regulars’ table hosted by his father, Albert Eckstein, the young intellectual came into contact with such eminent figures as the forestry engineer Wilhelm Franz Exner and the neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. At the literary Stammtisch in Café Imperial, he exchanged ideas with Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Franz Werfel, Rainer Maria Rilke, Robert Musil, Felix Salten, Adolf Loos, Leon Trotsky, and Anton Bruckner.

Vienna’s intellectuals were inquisitive, receptive, and eager for new models of explaining the world. Within his salon, Friedrich Eckstein founded the Austrian lodge of the Theosophical Society. Until his departure from Vienna, Rudolf Steiner belonged to Eckstein’s closest circle. Another key ally in theosophical matters was the social reformer, bourgeois feminist, and social worker Marie Lang. Her daughter Lilith studied at the School of Arts and Crafts; at the age of sixteen she posed nude for her fellow student and friend Oskar Kokoschka, who immortalized her in his book The Dreaming Boys.

Within the orbit of the Ecksteins and Langs, the painter Bronisława Pineles (later Koller-Pinell) met the physician and physicist Hugo Koller. Both came from affluent backgrounds, yet their parents frowned upon the prospect of marriage: she was of Jewish heritage, he from a Catholic family. Ultimately, they converted to Protestantism and entered into a union that embodied modern partnership. After the death of Broncia’s father, the wool manufacturer Saul Pineles, Hugo Koller acquired the family estate in Oberwaltersdorf near Vienna – by then converted into a textile factory – as a secondary residence. The Koller-Pinells commissioned Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser to transform the property into an elegant Gesamtkunstwerk. There, the couple’s extensive collections and, above all, Hugo Koller’s cultivated library found their home – an ideal setting for one of the most important salons of Viennese society.

The young Egon Schiele, with whom Broncia Koller-Pinell had forged a friendship, became a welcome guest from 1915 onward, together with his young wife Edith. During their extended visits to Oberwaltersdorf, Schiele created the iconic portrait of Hugo Koller, enveloped in his beloved books that shield him from the world like a cocoon. It was Broncia who encouraged her husband to sit for Schiele, just as she herself had been portrayed by colleagues such as Karl Hofer, one of the pivotal teachers of her daughter Silvia, or Albert Paris Gütersloh.

Broncia Koller-Pinell herself became a genuine focal point of the Viennese art scene. Among the younger artists she supported were Heinrich Schröder, Franz von Zülow, Nora von Zumbusch-Exner, Felix Albrecht Harta, Robin Christian Andersen, Anton Peschka, and Anton Faistauer. Well into her sixties, she even took lessons with Erika Giovanna Klien, more than three decades her junior.

Alma Mahler, too, was a guest at the Koller-Pinell salon. It was therefore hardly surprising that their son Rupert, pianist and conductor, fell in love with the very young Anna Mahler. The two married – only to divorce a few months later.

Article by Markus Hübl