Art: Gleams From a Gorgeous Twilight !

Two exhibitions brilliantly evoke turn-of-the-century Vienna

Neither as chic as Paris nor as intriguingly edgy as Budapest, the Vienna of today is a cozy and polished metropolis. But at the beginning of the 20th century, Vienna was chockablock with giants of the age: Freud and Wittgenstein, Mahler, Berg and Schoenberg, Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka, Hoffmann, Wagner and Loos -- as well as the young Adolf Hitler, a desperate artist-architect manque. Old cultural dogmas had been discredited, new doctrines not yet entrenched. Imminence was all. Artists and intellectuals all over Europe shared a sense of being on the very cusp -- between a smug century and a mad one,...

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