Facing the Modern: The Portrait in Vienna 1900 was an exhibition at the National Gallery, London, running from 9 October 2013 through to 12 January 2014.
Description
The exhibition was curated by Gemma Blackshaw and sponsored by Credit Suisse.
Exhibition catalogue
The exhibition catalogue was entitled Facing the Modern: The Portrait in Vienna 1900. It is edited by Gemma Blackshaw and has an introduction by Edmund de Waal. Contributors are:
Gemma Blackshaw (On Stage: The New Viennese; Past Times and Present Anxieties at the Galerie Miethke; Klimt, Schiele and Schonberg: Self Portraits). Tag Gronberg (Biedermeir Modern: representing Family Values). Doris H. Lehmann (Portraying Viennese Beauty: Makart and Klimt). Julie M. Johnson (Woman Artists and Portraiture in Vienna 1900). Elana Shapira (Imaging the Jew: A Clash of Civilisations). Sabine Wieber (A Beautiful Corpse: Vienna's Fascination with Death).
Introduction
Edmund de Waal is the author of The Hare with Amber Eyes, which tells the story of his family, the wealthy Jewish Ephrussi family, who settled in Vienna towards the end of the 19th century. One of the first things they did to establish themselves was to commission portraits. The exhibition catalogue explores the way in which portraiture in Vienna was intertwined with patronage, politics and the creation of taste. Included in the exhibition (exhibit no. 73) is an Ephrussi family photograph album, dating from about 1904, depicting members of the family in tableaux vivants.
On stage: the new Viennese
Gustav Klimt's Auditorium in the Old Burgtheater contains one hundred and thirty-one minutely realised portraits of the upper echelons of Viennese society at the time, and as such has been characterised as a portrait of the late 19th century. But it also an image of the emerging middle classes that most defined that century. The catalogue takes as its subject this new class, the Neu-Wiener (New Viennese), and retells the story of the modern portrait as its story.
Past times and present anxieties at the Galerie Miethke
The Galerie Miethke was one of Vienna's most progressive galleries. Yet in 1905 it devoted an exhibition to portraits of the early nineteenth century, the Alt-Wiener (Old Viennese), reflecting the anxieties of the age in seeking comfort from the past. Neu-Wiener (New Viennese) portraits such as Anton Romako's Portrait of Isabella Reisser reflect a new psychologism.
Biedermeier modern: representing family values
Tag Gronberg surveys the portrayal of family values over an extended 19th century ranging from the early 1800s to the First World War. In Fin-de-siècle Vienna it was still possible to see nostalgic portrayals of family life in the Biedermeier tradition of the first half of the century. But in the age of Freud such depictions of harmonious domesticity no longer went unchallenged and by 1918 portraits such as Egon Schiele's The Family posed stark challenges to the viewer.
Portraying Viennese beauty: Makart and Klimt
Hans Makart was the dominant portraitist in the Ringstrasse period (1857–1914). His portraits were primarily of young women from the upper middle classes and the lower ranks of the nobility, an upwardly mobile group of patrons anxious to legitimise their status in a rigidly hierarchical and traditional monarchical system. By Gustav Klimt's time, ideals of beauty had changed. Klimt incorporated design principles in his portraits that he had developed in his other works. In his later work the application of color increased dramatically, in response to the advent of Fauvism.
Klimt, Schiele, and Schönberg: Self Portraits
Gustav Klimt completed just one self-portrait during his 40-year career, declaring himself uninterested in himself as a subject for a painting. Egon Schiele on the other hand portrayed himself frequently, using his body as a medium of expression, approaching it as just another material to be manipulated. Schönberg was an untrained artist, "in many ways the archetypal artist-genius" in the Romantic tradition of the anxious and alienated artist, as represented in self-portraits by Friedrich von Amerling, Franz Eybl, and the young Rudolf von Alt.
Woman Artists and Portraiture in Vienna 1900
Julie M. Johnson discusses the lives and work of Broncia Koller-Pinell, Elena Luksch-Makowsky, and Teresa Ries. Woman artists in Fin-de-siècle Vienna, many of whom were Jewish, laboured under misogyny and restrictions, but nevertheless were able to pursue careers as public artists, to sustain studios, and to mount spectacular exhibitions.
Imaging the Jew: a clash of civilisations
Elana Shapira examines the portraiture of Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Richard Gerstl, and Arnold Schoenberg. In portraying their Jewish sitters, Klimt and Kokoschka sought to create a shared cultural platform between Jews and Christians while Gerstl and Schönberg sought to expose the problems behind that artistic aim.
A Beautiful Corpse: Vienna's Fascination with Death
Fin-de-siècle Vienna's fascination with death and dying may have been the result of a deep-rooted cultural pessimism, but it had positive affirmation as well in its tradition of a schöne Leiche, or beautiful corpse. When Gustav Klimt was called upon to paint a deathbed portrait of Ria Munk, a suicide scandalously involved with the novelist Hanns Heinz Ewers, he first portrayed her as a sleeping beauty. Her mother Aranka rejected this, as well as a subsequent version portraying her as a bare-breasted exotic dancer, leading Klimt to his celebrated, unfinished, Posthumous Portrait of Ria Munk III. The painting was seized by the Nazis and eventually restituted to the heirs of Aranka Munk in 2009, fetching £18,801,250 at auction in 2010.
Illustrative works
List of artists exhibited
Works from the following artist are exhibited: