The Embrace of Vienna

Klimt, Schiele and other masterpieces from the Belvedere museum Vienna

“The Embrace of Vienna” is a wide-ranging fresco of Mittel-European art and a window to the fin de siècle at the capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire. 

In collaboration with the Belvedere Museum of Vienna, eighty works have been brought together that take us from the genesis of nineteenth and twentieth century art, from the Baroque, through the Belle Époque, on to Biedermeier and thence to Secession and the early years of Expressionism. 

The exhibition starts with Baroque painting and includes masterpieces with religious and mythological subjects by Paul Troger, portraits by Martin Van Meytens and the virtuosity of the grotesque heads of the sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt. The halls take us chronologically through the areas dedicated to the grand tours of Italy and the Romantic depictions of cities such as Rome and Naples, as well as womanhood represented as the ideal of beauty both as mother and as femme fatale, as in the paintings of Johann Baptist Reiter. Ample space is given to the profound mark made on twentieth century art by the Viennese Secession, a cultured group of restless artists of the Jugendstil movement, including Klimt, of whom a number of works are exhibited such as After the Rain, Schloss Kammer on lake Atter and the splendid portrait of Johanna Staude, painted from  1917 to 1918. 

As well as significant works from Secession artists such as Koloman Moser and Otto Friedrich,  Villa Olmo is also host to some undisputed masterpieces by Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele, whose splendid yet terrible The Embrace is the emblematic and title work of the exhibition.