Tag: Vienna
Gustav Klimt’s ‘Schubert at the piano’
Until it was mentioned on the radio the other day I’d never heard of ‘Schubert at the piano’, and apart from being fellow-Austrians I wouldn’t have thought that Gustav Klimt and Franz Schubert had much in common – one an extrovert artist fond of painterly extravagance, the other a reticent musician famously given to introspection […]
Three paintings in Vienna
In the Leopold Museum in Vienna, a long wall is covered with small panels that show photographs and short lives of dozens of cultural figures who were active in the city at the start of the twentieth century: Freud, Mahler, Schoenberg, Musil, Wedekind, Klimt and many others – almost all of them well-known today. Only […]
Rachel Whiteread and Walter Sickert
It might be a sign of increasing age, but these days I prefer the quieter Tate Britain to the glitz and gargantuism of Tate Modern. Last weekend we went there early to see the retrospective of the sculptor Rachel Whiteread. Most of the works are shown together in a single undivided room and there weren’t […]
Angst and the void: Vienna portraits and Mira Schendel
Two London exhibitions, two very different ways of presenting and seeing art: ‘Facing the modern: portraits in Vienna 1900’ at the National Gallery, and ‘Mira Schendel’ at Tate Modern. We all think we know about art in Vienna in the decades immediately before the First World War. Politics: a rickety, arthritic empire waiting to be […]
