Letter From Europe

I have always thought that a particular artistic mojo gets handed around the world at different times in history. Cleary Florence in 1500 was the artistic center of the world as was New York in 1950. Walking through the museums of Vienna I would argue that Vienna in 1910 was an extraordinary center of creativity. Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschaka are the three artists that really seemed to be at the center of what they called The Secessionist Movement. It was an attempt to move away from academic painting towards a bold modernist statement that must have been shocking to Viennese society.

Klimt’s amazing Beethoven Frieze which now adorns a whole room in the Secessionist Museum was an allegorical tale of the power of art to be our guide to happiness. The final panel (above) of a kissing couple in front of the “Choir of Angels” plays off the final chorus of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the “Ode to Joy”. Like the ancient Greeks, the Secessionists believed that the cathartic power of art could renew a dead culture.

And of course in that renewal, there was shock and resistance from the powers that be. Schiele experienced most powerfully when he was thrown into prison for “exhibiting erotic drawings in a place accessible to children”. It’s hard to imagine, but the power of his painting, “The Embrace” must have overwhelmed Vienna.

Schiele died in 1918 at the young age of 28 during the great flu epidemic. As I walked through the Belvedere Palace, leaving behind Schiele and Klimt I came into another room of artists like Max Beckman who were working in Vienna and Berlin in the late 1920's. But their’s is a story of exile as the rise of Hitler drove most of them to New York or Paris.

And so the center of creativity moved on. But where is it now? I honestly can’t find it.