NGV Vienna Art and Design - Klimt Schiele Hoffmann Loos

Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century was the capital of a vast Austro-Hungarian Empire that stretched from Italy to Russia.

It was highly conservative but also opulent, elegant and daring. Casting aside outmoded social manners and moralities, private life became public spectacle. Cabarets, coffee-houses and nightclubs teemed with artistic abandon and radical debate.

And there was much to debate as the city was bursting with new ideas and beliefs. In 1899, Sigmund Freud published his theories on the interpretation of dreams and was developing the new discipline of psychoanalysis. In the same year, Max Planck presented his theory on quantum physics. Ernst Mach invented the philosophy of sensations. Wittgenstein developed logic and linguistic philosophy. Mahler and Schoenberg were astounding audiences with their radical innovations in music.

Science, psychology, literature, politics, music, fashion, the visual arts and architecture – in all these fields of endeavour, public debate raged in the quest to find a voice that was true for modern life.

Artists Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele and architects Josef Hoffmann and Adolf Loos were central to this artistic revolution, known as the Vienna Secession, which transformed Vienna into a dynamic metropolis at the forefront of ground-breaking ideas.

Hoffmann’s and Loos’s lucid visions for modern liveable homes, public buildings and furniture were aligned with the artisans of the Wiener Werksätte who created chic designs for every conceivable object of daily use, laying the foundations of the modern industrial look.

This inventive new world, which embraced extreme rationality in its architecture and design, equally encompassed the irrational and dark side of human nature. Morally and artistically radical, Klimt’s allegories about the forces of life in his Beethoven Frieze used ancient symbols to present new truths about human aspiration, while Schiele reflected the uncertainties of identity in a modern world through his sexually explicit, angst-ridden drawings.