NGV Vienna Art and Design - Klimt Schiele Hoffmann Loos

Sexuality

Early twentieth century Vienna was bursting with new ideas and beliefs about almost every aspect of society, including sexuality. As Sigmund Freud defined erotic obsession for a new millennium, artists such as Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele explored human sexuality in images of unparalleled and startling frankness.

• Sigmund Freud

The Vienna of 1900 liberated and celebrated the individual above all else. Enlightenment ideas moderated the dictates of religion, paving the way for recognition of human complexity.

Developments in science, including Darwinian Evolutionary Theory, coupled with bourgeois liberalism and the growth of a more secular society, led to a reinterpretation of the forces governing human behaviour and their expression in both science and the arts.

Sigmund Freud developed his theory of human behaviour motivated by the instinctual drives of Eros and Thanatos (sex and death). Defining the human psyche in terms of sexual gratification, he argued that neurosis and mental illness resulted from its repression.

Freud formulated the role of infant sexuality and also devised a 'talking cure' for psychological therapy which, in 1896, he termed psychoanalysis. Freud's seminal work The Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1899, forged a new understanding of the unconscious mind and the psyche.