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The Arts Intel Report

A Cultural Compass
For the World Traveler
A Cultural Compass
For the World Traveler

Vienna 1900: Birth of Modernism

Mar 16, 2019 – Mar 16, 2023
Museumsplatz 1, 1070 Wien, Austria

“Not only Vienna’s finest writers, but its painters and psychologists, even its art historians, were preoccupied with the problem of the nature of the individual in a disintegrating society,” writes Carl E. Schorske in the first chapter of his brilliant analysis of an era, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (1980). “Out of this preoccupation arose Austria’s contribution to a new view of man. . . . that richer, but more dangerous and mercurial creature, psychological man.” The Leopold Museum has reconceived the presentation of its collection over three floors, so as to offer new insights into Vienna circa 1900, a city that lit the match of Modernism in a multitude of disciplines. —L.J.

Otto Rudolf Schatz, “Die Hoffnung,” 1930 © Leopold Privatsammlung. Photo: Leopold Museum, Wien/ Manfred.