To a degree that even now can leave us gasping, the Secessionists and the members of the Wiener Werkstatte really did achieve their ambitions. Artists from all over Europe were made welcome, and when the Scottish architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife, the designer Margaret Macdonald, were the sensation of the Secession exhibition in 1900 there was a move to make them stay on forever. Furthermore, it was completely cosmopolitan, and looked at the world outside Vienna without prejudice. Thanks to the huge, all-permeating personalities that gave it momentum, the Secession made itself felt in every department of Viennese cultural life. Neither initiative was original, but both were rooted in ideas whose time had come. The cardinal events in the breakthrough in question were the foundation in 1897 of an artists' society called the Vienna Secession and the foundation six years later of the Wiener Werkstatte, whose object was to produce objects of household use that would rank as works of art (or vice versa). Robert Waissenberger, director of the Historical Museum of the City of Vienna, and designed by Hans Hollein, the Viennese architect who was lately awarded the prestigious Pritzker Prize, it is drawing very large crowds and can be seen through Oct. Just how far they got, we can see in a mammoth exhibition called ''Dream and Reality: Vienna 1870-1930'' that has been pushed and pulled into the pretty little Kunstlerhaus on the Karlsplatz in Vienna itself. Usually they get nowhere, but in Vienna between 1897 and the outbreak of World War I there were people who took the idea, ran with it and got a very long way. In fact they will do everything for us except do up our buttons. They also want to have a decisive hand in the look of our offices, our hotels, our restaurants, our automobiles, our subway stations, our post offices and our savings banks. Not only do they want to give us paintings and sculptures that will supersede all others, but they plan to dress us, furnish and decorate our houses, design our knives and forks, fit us out with new luggage, revolutionize our jewelry, give our children a new set of toys and keep us in scissors, ashtrays, purses, canes and bottle-stoppers. From time to time there comes to the fore - here, there, everywhere - a group of artists who want to make over the whole world in their own image and will settle for nothing less.
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