During the general enthusiasm about the turn of the century for artists frets and artist communities has also in the "art-rich" southern Austria a "club for art" - an art association - even launched. The aim was from the beginning is to arouse the interest of the public to make the understanding of art and the Carinthian artists and artists (at the beginning of the 20th century, this rather in the minority) to provide a broad platform for staging and presentation. Around 1900 there was the visual arts not only in Central Europe in a kind of revolutionary upswing of innovative trends, new groups and communities, programs and institutions greatly promoted. Thus, founded in 1907, Baron Ferdinand von Helldorf, first president and a freelance artist - in this sense - the Art Association of Carinthia, who organized exhibitions in the absence of a separate homeland in Crest halls and gymnasiums under difficult conditions. Helldorf contacts with the nobility and other influential personalities and his zeal, it is thanks to them that it was possible, Emperor Franz Joseph, a not inconsiderable support for the construction of a separate exhibition hall on the occasion of the 60th jubilee - the middle of the old town of Klagenfurt - to encash. From an episode in the Austria-wide competition for architectural competition, the Vienna-based architect Franz Baumgartner Carinthian emerged as the winner. Helldorf managed public figures such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, among other things by the project to inspire and so Wittgenstein counts in addition to representatives of the KuK High nobility to the founders of the house, which are immortalized on a marble plaque in the foyer. Baumgartner, of the so-called "Wörthersee-Nouveau" in architectural guide by F. Achleitner "Austrian Architecture in the 20th Century" is celebrated for a variety of Art Nouveau, designed the new "House of Artists" as a hybrid of Villa and exhibition house. The heritage protection Künstlerhaus Klagenfurt, since at that time the seat of the Kunstverein für Kärnten (since 2000 leads the club's name Kunstverein Carinthia, since at the request of the General Assembly of the "for" has been deleted in the designation as an anachronism), is considered today one of the most important monuments in the center of Klagenfurt.

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