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Facing the Modern: The Portrait in Vienna 1900

This exhibition and book was commissioned by the National Gallery and National Gallery Company in association with Yale University Press respectively in 2011. It developed out of a 2010-11 Leverhulme Research Fellowship awarded to Blackshaw in support of a monograph devoted to portraiture in Vienna 1900 (in process); Blackshaw was the sole guest-curator and editor. Facing the Modern was the UK’s first exhibition devoted to the portrait in Vienna 1900. Unusually, it considered the development of this genre during Vienna’s reign as Austrian capital of the tremendously heterogeneous Austro-Hungarian Empire, from 1867 to 1918. With this expanded time frame, the shift from historicism to modernism was problematised: works juxtaposed in a thematic as opposed to a chronological hang showed how the innovations of the early twentieth-century avant-garde both sustained and broke apart traditions of nineteenth-century art. The exhibition was an international-loan endeavour, and included paintings, drawings, photographs and death masks from a wealth of private and public collections in Europe and the US. The work of artists familiar to UK audiences, such as Klimt, Kokoschka and Schiele was displayed alongside that of their contemporaries, including Jewish and women artists, who have been largely forgotten, even in their native country. The exhibition aimed to 1) depart from the monographic and modernist presentation of the art of Vienna 1900 in exhibitions of the past few decades, and 2) to consider the portrait’s lead role in the staging of multicultural, middle-class identity. One of the most diverse, dynamic and divided sectors of society, Vienna’s middle classes used the portrait to declare their status and wealth, their hopes for the future and claims to the past. Portraits of men and women, families and children, the sick and dying, explored the shifting terrain of middle-class culture, and its association with the development of European modernism.