Beyond Klimt New Horizons in Central Europe 1914-1938

Exactly one hundred years on from their deaths, the Austrian artists Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele are still big names on the international art scene. The exhibition Beyond Klimt doesn’t just present the late work of these great masters, it gives visitors the  chance to familiarise themselves with the international avant- garde movements - surrealism, expressionism, new realism,  constructivism, Bauhaus etc. - which flourished after WWI in the young national states emerging from the gone Austro-Hungarian Empire. 

The exhibition features approximately eighty artists, including Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Koloman Moser, Egon Schiele, László Mohaly-Nagy, František Kupka and Alfred Kubin. 

The First World War caused a rift in European (art) history, resulting in radical geopolitical, economic and artistic changes. In 1918 the Austro-Hungarian Empire was permanently divided up into smaller nation states*. 1918 is also the year in which the renowned artists Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Koloman Moser and Otto Wagner died. As figureheads of the ‘Wiener Sezession’, their characteristic Art Nouveau style embodied the heyday of the Viennese Belle Epoque. Their death represented the end of an era. But what came after them? How have they influenced the next generation of artists and which artistic trends flourished in this region?  

Beyond Klimt portrays the artistic developments and diverse avant- garde movements in Central Europe between the key years of 1914  and 1938**. Artists from the former Austro-Hungarian Empire made contacts with art scenes throughout the world: they formed networks, used magazines to communicate across the new political borders and met up in art centres and associations. They believed their artistic identity was more important than their nationality. The intensive exchange of ideas resulted in international movements such as surrealism, expressionism, neorealism and constructivism. This internationalism came to an abrupt end with the outbreak of the Second World War, when the feeling of a shared culture was pushed to the background. 

An exhibition by the Belvedere, Vienna and the Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels (BOZAR) in collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts – Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest. The exhibition will be shown at the Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels (BOZAR) to coincide with the Austrian Presidency of the Council of the European Union. It is a contribution to the European Year of Cultural Heritage 2018. 

Before the start of the First World War, seismic changes were taking place all over Europe that affected all parts of society. These changes proved to be a catalyst for modern art. Artists from the ‘father generation’, such as Alfons Mucha, József Rippl-Rónai, and Gustav Klimt, paved the way to modernism. As prominent representatives of separate secessionist movements, they had already gained cult status in the former crown lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The sweeping changes brought by the war forced the artists to adopt a new approach.

Gustav Klimt and his Czech colleagues Alfons Mucha and Jan Preisler focused primarily on decorative allegory. The Hungarian painter József Rippl-Rónai adopted a Post-Impressionist signature style. The younger generation is juxtaposed with the older masters in this exhibition. Artists such as Max Oppenheimer, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka, József Nemes-Lampérth, and Lajos Tihanyi, who developed their own distinctive approach to Expressionism, are shown in a sort of dialogue.

Form art and the Fantastic  

While Art Nouveau in Vienna was inspired by geometric and ornamental forms, as can be seen in the work of Gustav Klimt and Adolf Hölzel, at a slightly later date in Prague Czech Cubism was being developed by artists such as Antonín Procházka and Bohumil Kubišta, and also František Kupka, who was painting non-representational works.

What both movements have in common is their connection to Form Art, which was significantly influenced by the pedagogical principles of Johann Friedrich Herbart. Based on the reduction of every object to the most basic geometric shapes (of geometric trigonometry), his philosophy and teachings led the way for the  entire Austrian-Hungarian Empire starting in the mid- nineteenth century. 

Such constructivist methods of composition were accompanied by a tendency in the opposite direction: ambivalent content that oscillated between meditation and alienation, linking narrative and fantastical elements of older artists such as Alfred Kubin, Richard Teschner, and Ivan Meštrović, with the younger artists such as Jan Zrzavý. Meštrović and Zrzavý provided glimpses into the internal world of the human soul.





Meštrović’s Vestal Virgin sits in a contemplative pose, and Zrzavý’s fantastical figures exude a captivating radiance. Their sense of internal peace is an expression of humanity that represents a complete contrast to the diabolical aspects of war depicted in Kubin’s gruesome visions, which are presented in other halls of the exhibition.

War and Disillusionment 

The initial enthusiasm for the war felt by most artists quickly evaporated. Many artists, even older ones such as László Mednyánsky and Albin Egger-Lienz, sought work as correspondents in the War Press Office. They compassionately documented the events of the war. János Vaszary’s Soldiers in the Snow, for example, shows exhausted figures in ragged clothing, whose visible suffering starkly contrasts with the mobilising and propagandistic effect of Alois Schramm’s Guard of the Carpathians. Human suffering is the subject of the stylised, symbolic pictures of Albin Egger-Lienz and Robert Angerhofer as well as Jan Štursa’s sculpture Wounded Man.

Georg Trakl’s last poem Gródek describes the beginning of the Carpathian Winter War that drove him to suicide. The campaign claimed so many lives in 1914–15 that it is comparable to the losses at Verdun. While in Western Europe Verdun is today considered a symbol of the inhumanity of war, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire this role is taken by the fortress Przemyśl, which also found its way into the work of Alfred Kubin. Klemens Brosch was marked by his participation in this campaign for the rest of his life. His trauma is reflected in drawings that capture the mercilessness and the horrors that had been previously inconceivable.   

Many avant-garde journals became active, dynamic platforms of art. As well as offering social criticism on all aspects of public and cultural life, they also facilitated artistic exchange in international networks. Some of the most important journals were MA, Integral,  Contimporanul, Egység, and Zenit. The production of politically motivated art was also reflected in the posters of the era, such as the one by Vojtěch Preissig, who during the war had called people to fight for a future Czechoslovakian republic, or the famous poster by Mihály Bíró making propaganda for the new Hungarian Republic of Councils in 1919. These posters document the spirit of euphoria and revolution that was dominant in the various artistic circles of the 1920s. While the political posters mostly achieved their effect through emotionalising imagery, the opposite was true of the new, rational method of popular education developed by the economist Otto Neurath. Dry economic statistics were represented in pictograms, making complex interrelationships clearer and easier to understand. 

The international exhibition of new theatre technology In the autumn of 1924, the International Exhibition of New Theatre Technology at the Konzerthaus in Vienna opened a new chapter in the history of theatre. Its skilful dramaturgy, innovative exhibition concept, and graphic design by the architect and designer Friedrich Kiesler transformed the city of Vienna into a magnet for the masters of the avant-garde, attracting artists such as the Italian Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Theo van Doesburg from the De Stijl movement, Fernand Léger from France, and Bauhaus artists from Weimar. However, some of the most creative artists came from the former Austrian-Hungarian Empire. Presented alongside Kiesler’s imposing Space Stage were recent sketches and studies by avant-garde artists such as Lászlo Moholy-Nagy. 

The exhibition was an expression of the cross-genre thinking typical of the avant-garde art of the 1920s, which is reflected in the Mechanical Stage Review by Andor Weininger and the designs for a Kinetic Marionette Theatre by Erika Giovanna Klien from 1926. Bauhaus – The allure of modernity  The large number of students and teachers from the countries of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire at the Bauhaus reflects the artistic potential of this cultural region. All were drawn to the Bauhaus by their desire to translate modern art into life. Our view of modernism is shaped today by the chairs designed (and actually produced) by Franz Singer and Friedl Dicker-Brandeis from Vienna and the legendary tubular metal chair by Marcel Breuer. 

Similarly iconic works can also be found in Bauhaus theatre technology (László Moholy-Nagy and Andor Weininger),  architecture (Farkas Molnár), and advertising (Friedl Dicker- Brandeis and Herbert Bayer). Bauhaus thought informed Sándor  Bortnyik’s Műhely art school, which was founded in Budapest and counted among its students Victor Vasarely, whose work prefigured Op Art of the 1960s. 



Sándor Bortnyik (1893-1976), Green Donkey, 1924, Oil on canvas, 60 x 55cm © Szépművészeti Múzeum - Museum of Fine Arts Budapest, 2018/19   

The cosmopolitan attitude that Paris radiated was still attractive after the First World War. This was encouraged by the French government, which unlike other European countries, actually consciously promoted immigration in the 1920s. This liberalness and the possibility of exchange encouraged the formation of artistic groups. Abstraction-Création is considered the most important and largest supranational association of the period. ‘Abstraction’ stands for organically developed forms, and ‘création’ for the composition that is created only with geometric elements. Constructivist artists, such as László Moholy-Nagy, as well as artists who were oriented towards Surrealism could join. The only requirement for membership was a non-figurative artistic approach and a recommendation by one of the members. In this way Etienne Beöthy recommended his artist colleague Lajos Tihanyi, and Kupka his fellow Czech  countryman František Foltýn as members. 

The large number of artists from the former Austria- Hungarian Empire is notable, who are represented in this exhibition by Jindřich Štyrský, Toyen, Zedněk  Dvořák, Wolfgang Paalen, and Friedrich Kiesler. Variations on the figurative  While in the work of Oskar Kokoschka and Anton Kolig the nervous brushstroke remains a characteristic feature of their expressive style, a more painterly approach was developed in the 1920s. Instead of an often provocative, extroverted style of painting, the subject matter becomes more intimate, while the controlled broad brushstroke remains visible, as in the



Sleeping Lady with Black Vase by Róbert Berény

Marie-Louise von Motesiczky
Self portrait with comb, 1926
Oil on canvas
83 x 45 cm
© Belvedere, Vienna

or in the Self-Portrait with Comb by Marie-Louise von Motesiczky.

Jenő Barcsay (1900-1988), Red Youths (workers), 1928, Oil on canvas, 75 x 100,7cm, © Szépművészeti Múzeum - Museum of Fine Arts Budapest, 2018/19   

Symbolic content becomes more prevalent in pictures such as Red Boys (Workers) by Jenő Barcsay. Both of these tendencies are also apparent in sculpture. Fritz Wotruba develops his Torso in an expressive way, while Mary Duras models the intimacy of subjects in the sensual clay of her terra-cotta sculptures. On the other hand, Anton Hanak and Otto Gutfreund embrace a new, comparatively sober Realism in both of their busts in the exhibition.

Lajos Tihanyi (1985-1938)
Composition in Blue and Yellow, 1934
Oil on plywood
38,5 x 46cm
© Szépművészeti Múzeum - Museum of Fine Arts Budapest, 2018/19

Lajos Tihanyi (1985-1938), Composition in Blue and Yellow, 1934, Oil on plywood, 38,5 x 46cm 

Scunity and alienating realism  

In the economic depression and social malaise of the late 1920s and early 1930s, the atrocities of the First World War seemed to be forgotten to such an extent that a combination of militant politics and an exaggerated nationalism threatened to drag the global world order into a new conflict. New Objectivity’s themes of social criticism and political or objective commentary featured in art from Košice to Pilsen and from Vienna to Ljubljana, Budapest, Belgrade, and Zagreb. The disintegration of society is clearly seen in the pictures by Herbert Ploberger or Gyula Derkovits, in which luxury and poverty are the subjects. Alfred Kubin and Franz Sedlacek produced images of unknown, bizarre threats or the decline of the individual as in the pictures of Rudolf Wacker. The symbolic fragmentation of the already fragile balance is a disconcerting foreshadowing of the totalitarian systems that were taking shape. Based on ideological, ethnic, and religious persecution, these systems question all morals, and also force into exile artists such as Wilhelm Thöny and ultimately led to the Second World War.  

 From Humanism to Barbarism, via Nationalism  

The insidious rise of a dictatorship in Germany was followed by aggressive power politics, founded on brute violence. Following the Munich Agreement, not only entire states fell victim to the aggression of the regime, but also —most crucially—their people. After the euphoric Roaring Twenties, a time in which artists and intellectuals had cultivated a dynamic environment for the exchange of ideas, in the 1930s,  persecution on political, ethnic, racial, and religious grounds forced many artists to flee.

Friedl Dicker- Brandeis and Oskar Kokoschka emigrated to Prague, as did the German satirist John Heartfield, whose  photomontages were published there starting in 1933. Like Kokoschka, he fled to England shortly before the occupation of Czechoslovakia. The Prague artist Walter Trier and the Hungarian Stefan Lorant fled from Germany to London, where they designed and published satirical newspapers. Dicker-Brandeis, however, was murdered in 1944 in Auschwitz.

Nevertheless, artists opposed the dictatorship and the military occupation.  Emil Filla’s painting Variation on a Moravian Folk Song was a rallying call against war and violence. Although Filla was already interned in Dachau in 1939, the painting was still exhibited in Prague. Filla survived his imprisonment in the concentration camp; however, his fellow prisoner Vojtěch Preissig paid with his life for publishing subversive flyers and an underground newspaper.



Herbert Ploberger (1902-1977), Window Shopping, 1928, Oil on wood, 40 x 34cm, © Private Collection, Vienna