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Vienna secession 1918 zedlacher3/28/2023 ![]() ![]() The K"unstlerhaus, the city's foremost exhibition hall, is a 116-year-old neo-Renaissance building a few blocks from the Vienna State Opera. The growth of the Social Democratic and Christian Social movements belong to them as do anti-Semitism and Zionism.'' We wanted to put fin-de-si ecle art into the context of cultural, social and political developments in the Vienna of the period. Robert Waissenberger, director of the Historical Museum of the City of Vienna for the last 11 years and author of a book on the Vienna Secession, who conceived the idea of a fin- de-si ecle show, explained that ''The area we are covering is immense we can only give highlights and suggestions of trends that pointed into the future. We expect that the response to the Jewish contributions, as made clear by the exhibition, will be absolutely positive.'' The Vienna of the turn of the century is part of our very roots. ''It was a political decision to organize such a show,'' said Franz Mrkvicka, the Vienna city government's commissioner in charge of cultural affairs. The theme of one room in the Vienna exhibition is ''Zionism and Anti-Semitism.'' The first edition of Herzl's booklet, ''Der Judenstaat'' (1896), with manuscripts and letters by him, are counterposed to pamphlets and posters inveighing against the Jews. They all lived and worked in the same cosmopolitan city at the time when a Jewish journalist, Theodor Herzl, founded modern Zionism, and when, only a few years later, a failed painter from the provinces, Adolf Hitler, was peddling his watercolors in coffeehouses and taverns. Arthur Schnitzler, the reluctant doctor who rendered the moods of a disintegrating society in his novels and plays, was the son of a prominent Jewish physician. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the poet who wrote librettos for Richard Strauss operas, was of Jewish descent. Who suggested that his art expressed a ''degenerate'' Jewish mentality. Klimt, the leader of the Vienna Secession movement - the fin-de-si ecle revolt against academic art - although he was a gentile, was a prime target of attacks from anti-Semites, ![]() All four were Jewish or had Jewish relatives. The official folder of the Vienna exhibition carries, in a panel under the self-portrait by a gaunt Schiele, the likenesses of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl Kraus, Gustav Mahler, and Sigmund Freud. The ambiguity of the Viennese achievement during those decades crystallized in the contributions of the city's Jewish artists and thinkers - and the anti-Semitism directed toward them. The show traces those movements, and the social currents from which they grew - and it also suggests the conflicts between the city's sumptuous and escapist dreams of esthetic glory and the darker realities which intruded on those visions both in political life and in art. The astonishing outpouring of creative activity during those years contained the germs of this century's most important artistic and itellectual movements. 1 to May 15, 1986.Īll the great names of fin-de-si ecle Vienna and of the struggling metropolis after World War I, are represented in the K"unstlerhaus with their own works as well as with manuscripts, books, portraits and other testimonials by themselves, by admirers and by detractors. The show, comprising about 1,500 exhibits, will move to New York's Museum of Modern Art late next year or early in 1987 after a run at the Centre Pompidou in Paris from Feb. Entitled ''Dream and Reality - Vienna 1870-1930,'' the $1.4 million exhibition begins Thursday in the K"unstlerhaus, where it will be open from 10 A.M. Now, Vienna itself, where so much creativity exploded simultaneously in many fields several generations ago, is staging a comprehensive show with Klimt and Schiele at its center, but also much more. And exhibitions from Edinburgh to Venice have focused on the Jugendstil, the Danubian version of Art Nouveau, and on Vienna's subsequent awakening from esthetic reveries to angst and Expressionism. There was little surprise when a Schiele painting, his gnarled ''Liebespaar I,'' fetched a record $2.7 million at an auction at Sotheby's in London recently. Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, two artists of fin- de-si ecle Vienna, have been experiencing a vogue in Europe these last few years - a vogue spurred by growing fascination with the artistic-intellectual Vienna from the turn of the century to the first decade after World War I.
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