Word: klimt
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...novelty in Dijkstra's approach is that he has illustrated his tour through fin-de-siecle fantasy not only with such masters as Degas or Klimt but with more than 300 of the new photographic reproductions that were spreading art's pernicious messages through popular magazines. Hypocrisy was the order of the day. Thus Albert von Keller's lubricious portrait of a naked woman crucified bears the pious title Martyr, and all those nude beauties frolicking around that white-bearded codger represent Lovis Corinth's Temptation of Saint Anthony. Exotic suggestions of bestiality (as with Salammbo) provided another popular theme...
...elderly head attendant of the asylum, Charles-Elzeard Trabuc, is to receive a vivid lesson in the adjustment of manner to motif. Trabuc's cotton jacket, with its emphatic parallel stripes of blackish-blue, is as explicitly stylized as anything produced within the next quarter-century by Klimt or, for that matter, Miro. But in the head, this graphic energy is subordinated to volume, to the immobile self-containment of a man who, Van Gogh realized, "has seen an enormous amount of suffering and death." The chin and mouth are compressed, but the brow bulges irresistibly from its pale background...
...gorgeous twilight between empire and dissolution, the city's ; radical young artists and architects broke from the local academy, named themselves Secessionists and established their own countersalon in 1897. They called their journal Ver Sacrum (Sacred Spring) and practiced, as a matter of principle, a manic cross-fertilization. With Klimt, art became overtly decorative, gold-inlaid portraits masquerading as rich bijoux; with Hoffmann and his Wiener Werkstatte collaborator Koloman Moser, bowls and chairs aspired to art. It was a feverish, unresolved time, and the Viennese fin-de-siecle impulse was to savor the exquisitely confused cultural moment...
Just as the architects' and designers' pioneering zeal seemed to give out, the enfants terribles Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka (see following story) had their first shows of paintings in Vienna. Their intense, expressionist works did not flirt, like Klimt's gilded sultanic pictures, with bourgeois prettiness and what the catalog calls "proto-psychedelic sweetness." Schiele, who died young (in 1918, along with Moser, Wagner and Klimt), has been the subject of more passionate popularity than Kokoschka over the years: his images were the more earnestly pained and ugly. As Varnadoe writes, Viennese arts had lost their capacity for compromise...
...longed to escape was no mean irony. Kokoschka's shenanigans failed to throw the burghers into the turmoil he hoped for, but they made an indelible impression on his friends, a circle that included the satirist Karl Kraus, the architect Adolf Loos and a galaxy of painters from Gustav Klimt to Wassily Kandinsky. His most eccentric episode was that of the doll. In the spring of 1912 he fell violently in love with Alma Mahler, widow of the composer and a pretentious man-eater. Their affair lasted three years, and she dumped him in favor of the architect Walter Gropius...