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| Isidore Kaufmann, Young Rabbi, c1910 |
Facing the Modern: The Portrait in Vienna 1900 is at The National Gallery until 12 January 2014.
Turn of the century Vienna was an extraordinary place: the capital
of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was a cosmopolitan centre notable for the
richness of its Jewish culture (to be all but wiped out by the rise
of Nazism in the 1930s), avant-garde experiments in art, architecture and
music, and the invention of psychoanalysis. It was the city of Sigmund Freud, painters
Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, architect Adolf Loos, composer Arnold Schönberg,
critic Karl Krauss amongst others.
This exhibition purports to explore the evolution of modern
identity and individualism through the portraits painted in that city. Reviews
suggest that the story it tells lacks some clarity and focus but that it
includes some very remarkable drawings
and paintings. Laura Cumming, for example draws attention to Klimt's portrait of Amalie
Zuckerkandl - he died of a stroke before finishing it - and,
most poignant of all is Schiele's sketch of his young
wife (see below), six months pregnant, dying of Spanish flu in October 1918. The pencil
carries the febrile trace of death inch by inch across her beautiful face; as
the pulse slows, the features sink and the eyes lose their brilliant vitality.
The terrible swiftness of this contagion is apparent from the few strands of
loose hair caught on her moist brow: the rest is still just as she must have
pinned it up so neatly only hours before. Schiele himself would be dead in
three days.
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| Gustav Klimt, Portrait of Amalie
Zuckerkandl, 1917-18 |
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| Oskar Kokoschka, Portrait of Hans and Erica Tietze-Conrat, 1909 |
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| Egon Schiele, Self Portrait with Raised Bare Shoulder, 1912 |
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| Egon Schiele, The Family (Self Portrait), 1918 |
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| Egon Schiele, portrait sketch of his wife, 1918 |
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