THE NAKED TRUTH. KLIMT, SCHIELE, KOKOSCHKA, AND OTHER SCANDALS
28. January - 24. April 2005

Art and scandal in Vienna around 1900: there is hardly another city more suited for such an investigation than the metropolis on the Danube – a city conveying the sense of a new era of art about to dawn and full of visual, sensuous, and intellectual energies on the one hand and a center determined by a Catholic conservative basic attitude, the hub of an empire on the eve of its decline on the other. The exhibition "The naked truth - Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka and other scandals" highlights the society’s conflict with modernity. At odds with the secular and clerical authorities, Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka, a.o. explored a range of taboos: pregnancy, sexuality and power, homoeroticism, the battle of the sexes, and adolescence. Egon Schiele portrayed Eros, misery, and death with a radical directness and was imprisoned for doing so. And Adolf Loos caused one of the greatest architectural scandals that Vienna ever saw with his – in the words of the contemporary press – “obscenely naked” house on Michaelerplatz. The exhibition presents the Austrian art of the beginning 20th century beyond all fin de siècle romanticism in its uncompromising modernity and its still effective explosive social impact.

Curator: Tobias G. Natter, Vienna.