EVENT LANGUAGE: GERMAN

NEW SPIRIT

Guided tour through the exhibition Hidden Modernity. Fascination of the occult around 1900

with Matthias Dusini and Ivan Ristić

At the end of the 19th century, the need for spirituality grew stronger. The materialism of bourgeois society and the traditional churches no longer seemed to offer answers to the big questions. Nature worshippers from an intellectual milieu read Friedrich Nietzsche’s novel Also sprach Zarathustra and became enthusiastic about Richard Wagner’s operas. The artist prophet and Wagnerian Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach founded one of the world’s first rural communes on the outskirts of Vienna.

Early modern painters found new forms of expression in theosophy, spiritualism and dance. Edvard Munch saw his models as ethereal beings, threatening and attractive at the same time. Ferdinand Hodler painted “figures that cannot become boring because you always think you understand them and can never fully comprehend them” (Ludwig Hevesi). Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele mediatized the view inwards; their auratic depictions of people reflect a mystical, often enraptured attitude to life. Esoteric ideas paved the way to abstraction for their contemporaries such as Wassily Kandinsky, František Kupka and Johannes Itten.

The major autumn exhibition at the Leopold Museum focuses on the life-reforming search for the “New Humans” in art and society, without concealing dark aspects of magical thinking.

Registration required: FULLY BOOKED.