Vienna - a city obsessed with modernity

The first artist to be truly obsessed with Vienna is Egon Schiele. Schiele and Klimt.

Photo: Junko / Pixabay

Until the 1970s, when Rudolf Leopold published a catalog with brief explanations of his paintings and drawings, Schiele was almost unknown. After that, fame fell on the artist - postcards and posters, books and reproductions - everyone around loved Schiele and was delighted with his short, dramatic life. Everyone who was studying in Austria at that time was affected by the obsession with Schiele. The angular, recognizable, almost pornographic images of men and women were an exciting revelation, even for posterity rather than for contemporaries of this original artist. Most of his work is today in the Leopold Museum. Be sure to go to the exhibition - even after decades, his fantastic canvases and drawings retain their devastating effect on the viewer. In a sense, Schiele is a wonderful symbol not of Vienna itself, but of its complete opposite. Without a doubt, this small beautiful bourgeois city was literally blown up from the inside by conceptual modernism in all its manifestations and forms.

Want to do an experiment on yourself? Then stand in front of a large, almost life-size, picture of Schiele’s “Sitting Naked Man” and think about how you could accept it in 1910? Gloomy, emaciated man, orange nipples, dark pubis, lack of legs - as if they were amputated. Until now, he is incredibly worried. After Schiele’s graphic courage, Klimt’s etiolated nudes seem almost dying. Klimt’s drawings bear an erotic connotation, but compared to Schiele’s drawings, they seem half-hearted, unsaid. It was Schiele who accepted the crown of Klimt as an outstanding artist of the Art Nouveau style, after Klimt died in February 1918. Schiele himself died eight months after Klimt from the pandemic flu that broke out in Europe. He was only 28 years old. And still Schiele is considered the greatest draftsman, along with Degas and Picasso.

Schiele, Klimt and Kokoschka are the great three artists of the Vienna Secession. Klimt and Schiele died in 1918, and Oscar Kokoschka, born in 1886, lived to 1980 - an amazingly rich and long life. But Kokoshka became famous not only for his paintings, but also for his turbulent romp all over Vienna, with Gustav Mahler’s widow, Alma, a surprisingly beautiful woman, a little older than Kokoshka, the “blue stocking” and the artist, at the same time. Some contemporaries considered her to be obsessed with sex, using her great lovers (after Mahler and Kokoshka, she also met with the famous architect Gropius and writer Verfel). After two years of relationship, Alma terminated the alliance with Kokoshka, because she felt that the situation was getting out of control, the emotions in this pair were so stormy. In desperation, Kokoshka made a life-size wooden doll of Alma, which he kept in his studio. Very Viennese. Because this city makes a strange impression of the merging of personal tragedies and the history of art, and from the pompous starched cape of the moral code of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, vivid, vibrant sexual morals of the era are still beaten out, and only together can truly characterize the empire and her values.

Vienna - a city obsessed with modernity Automatic translate