The exhibition “Facing the Modern: The Portrait in Vienna 1900” at London’s National Gallery in fact covers over forty years, from the proclamation by the Emperor Franz-Joseph I of equal rights and free movement for the citizens of the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1867 to its total collapse of 1918. It was for Vienna a time of very rapid social and economic change with an influx of new peoples and the making of new fortunes in commerce and industry. It was also a remarkably creative period, not just in art but in architecture, literature, philosophy, music, science, and economics. The exhibition illustrates these glories, but also brings out the city’s darker obsessions, notably with social status and with death; worst of all was the pervasive anti-Semitism that had come to take on a frightening political aspect by 1900.
Many will come to the exhibition to seek out portraits by the famous modern artists—Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Oskar Kokoschka. They are present in all their alienation and have retained their power to disturb even though no one now is shocked by them. Kokoscha’s Portrait of Peter Altenberg (1909) is a painter’s version of a vicious cartoon from Simplicissimus, and his Portrait of Hans Tietze and Erica Tietze-Conrat (1909) sets asunder the couple just joined in matrimony. He painted them separately; they neither touch nor look at each other. It is a comic relief to behold Arnold Schönberg’s Blue Self-Portrait(1910), in which he has deleted the image of