The body, rendered in a highly personal style, takes centre stage in Gustav Klimt’s nudes: refined, seductive and restless figures that embody the early 20th-century reflections on art, psychology and literature. In the works of Egon Schiele, the emaciated bodies of men and women, almost transformed into dehumanised mannequins, become the focus of a powerful exploration of the human condition, revealing the artist’s strong connection with the emerging field of psychoanalysis. The two great masters of the Viennese Secession are joined by the visionary genius of Oskar Kokoschka, whose vibrant, expressionist painting conveys the anxieties of an era standing on the threshold of the First World War.
The theme of the body as representation and symbol, connected to both flesh and psyche, does not fade away, but returns with renewed force in the period between the two World Wars, caught between censorship and vibrant expressions of freedom, before once again becoming central to contemporary thought.
A common thread connects the philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology, literature and visual arts that developed in Austria, and particularly in Vienna, in the early 20th century – that city Karl Kraus described as a “laboratory for the end of the world” – to the revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s, which laid the foundations for the present day.
Art of rupture and protest, from Nouveau Réalisme and Conceptual Art to Body Art and performance, reclaimed the centrality of the body, drawing new inspiration from the brilliant yet tragic legacy of fin-de-siècle Vienna.
In contemporary art, the body emerges as the ultimate battlefield: from Piero Manzoni’s ironic Living Sculptures to Yves Klein’s mystical Anthropometries.
The body becomes both an instrument of art and a political message in the works of brilliant interpreters of Body Art such as Ana Mendieta and Gina Pane. Skin, flesh, sex, and physicality become the perfect means to express new anxieties – both collective, such as the struggle against social conformism, and individual, driven by the aching desire to be seen and to be loved.
