Josef Engelhart, Akt im Kastanienbaum, o.J. Aquarell, teilweise weiß gehöht, über Bleistift auf Papier, 36,2 x 25,9 cm, MdM Salzburg © VBK, Wien, 2008, Repro: Hubert Auer.

Anton Hanak, Der brennende Mensch, 1922, Bronze, 30 x 12 cm, MdM Salzburg, Repro: Hubert Auer.

Museum der Moderne Rupertinum
Wiener-Philharmoniker-
Gasse 9
+43.662.84.22.20-451
Salzburg
Art at the Dawn of a New Era. Painting, Graphics, Sculpture and Photography around 1900
June 7-October 26, 2008

During the last decades of the 19th and the first decades of the 20th century the course was set for a new society and the development of new art forms. The traditional pictorial schemata are continued into the Secessionist era, while new revolutionary pictorial concepts are heralded already before the turn of the 20th century. Photography is starting to play a role, and its image findings remain in effect both as studio photography and as landscape photography and in the fictional genre well into the 1930s.

With examples from the MdM’s own collection and selected p hotographs on loan to the museum, the exhibition discusses this phenomenon of continuity amidst a scenario of radical upheavals.

No other period during the last century was so characterized by uncontemporaneity and contemporaneity of different art movements at the same time. The art scene is dominated by great “preservers” along with radical
innovators, established artists as well as revolutionaries. And for the first time in the
history of art a bourgeois taste develops which is based on self- confidence and economic power, yet permits new concepts: in particular the drawings by Gustav Klimt must be mentioned in this context. At the same time traditionally oriented artists such as Rudolf von Alt and Carl Moll continue to be appreciated and pa ss on their conception of art until late into the 1920s.

Expressive art by artists such as Schiele or Gerstl are considered a radical break with traditions, and Kokoschka is even insultingly called “Oberwilding” (“a super wild one”). Between tradition and revolution, artistic fields of interest are developed which move away from the secure terrain of a prolonged symbolism and deal with the fragility of human existence: the "other side“ is discovered not only by contemporary literature and psychoanalysis, but also by artists such as Alfred Kubin and Jean Egger. With examples from painting, graphics, photography and individual sculptural works, subjects such as the continued effect of symbolism, the discovery of one’s own self -perception, self-dramatization and transformation are portrayed in the exhibition, also including landscape motives as a description of one’s mental state and the gestures of expressionism to express an urgent emotionality.

The discovery of the body, of one’s own physicality and nakedne ss, of movement in free space and the efforts for emancipation are essential parts of this area of conflict between artistic possibilities during the final years of the 19th century and the early interwar years.

Artists in the exhibition include Rudolf von Alt, Franz von Bayros, Jean Egger, Josef Engelhart, Anton Faistauer, Trude Fleischmann, Richard Gerstl, Anton Hanak, Hugo Henneberg, Ferdinand Kitt, Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Rudolf Koppitz, Alfred Kubin, Heinrich Kühn, Erwin Lang, Bertold Löffler, Madame d'Ora, Manass e, Emilie Mediz-Pelikan, Carl Moll, Michael Powolny, Egon Schiele, Nicholas Schindler, Josef Schulz, Anton Steinhart, Wilhelm Thöny.

A richly illustrated brochure is published in conjunction with the exhibition.

Curators are Eleonora Louis, Margit Zuckriegl and Andrea Hofinger