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Alfred Roller. Ver Sacrum, Heft 10, October 1898
“In the discourse on Viennese modernism, the early issues of Ver Sacrum (Holy Spring), the official art periodical of the Association of Visual Artists of Austria (Vereinigung Bildender Künstlers Österreichs), have been seen as important manifestos of the artistic aims of the founding members of the Vienna Secession, a group of painters, designers, and architects gathered around the prominent artist, Gustav Klimt, to form Austria’s first avant-garde artist collective in 1897 (…) Ver Sacrum was more than a simple harmony of text and illustration: instead, it carried a complex message of design realized through the art of ‘through-composition’. Through-composed, a musical term, suggests a continuous structuring device throughout the duration of the work, or in this case, throughout the pages of an issue.”
Peter Brooker, Sascha Bru, Andrew Thacker, and Christian Weikop. The Oxford critical and cultural history of modernist magazines, volume III: Europe 1880-1940, part II. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013 (p. 992)