Swallowed by the black hole of Suprematism

Self Portrait (1908-10)

It’s difficult to remember, sometimes, both how long ago modern art became ‘modern’ and how much world events can shape what we see in galleries.

Somehow, for instance, it’s difficult to mentally locate Duchamp’s urinal in the years of WWI – perhaps because we look at pictures of that world and the way people were dressed, and find it hard to think of it alongside art works that, even today, are considered so radical that many would not accept that they are art.

But in the context of major political and social upheavals – and a world war – fits rather obviously into such a description – perhaps radical art may well be inevitable as artists search for a way to deal with what is going on.

And of course, in the case of revolution, then exactly the same would be true.

Bathers Seen from Behind (1910)

Now on at the Tate Modern until 26 October, an exhibition of works by Kazimir Malevich (1879-1935) is a perfect illustration of such things.

A room of early paintings shows a mixed approach, from conventional portraits to Self Portrait (1908-10), which is far more expressive.

Bathers Seen from Behind (1910) has a modernity in its abstraction of the subject, and Shroud of Christ from 1908 incorporates a background decoration that is reminiscent of Russian icon art.

Incidentally, on Bathers Seen from Behind, anyone else recognise a spot of cloisonnism?

Shroud of Christ (1908)

But this was already a period of huge upheaval in Russian life.

When Malevich had started painting, the country was still a Tsarist autocracy, with a vast percentage of the populace being peasants.

Growing demands for change saw many artists looking west for inspiration, but for others, they sought to create a specifically Russian type of art, focusing on very Russian subjects, which included the peasantry.

In terms of this exhibition, you see Malevich’s

Bather (1911)

style leap forward in 1911, with Bather, but it’s with The Scyther (1911-12) that we first really see the desire to create a particularly Russian visual language appear.

It was a style that he extended with Morning in the Village After Snowstorm (1912) a work where it’s possible to see both the influences of Cubism and Futurism.

Filippo Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto had been published three years earlier, calling on artists to reject the traditional in art in favour the cults of speed, technology and the machine.

In Russia there was just as much enthusiasm as elsewhere, but in Malevich’s works from this period, we find a combination of Futurism with Cubism – Cubo-Futurism.

But hopping between styles, he also produced a number of avowedly Cubist works – In the Grand Hotel (1913) is a particularly fine one, with a rather haunting quality.

In the Grand Hotel (1913)

In early 1914, Malevich had declared that he renounced reason, and when war broke out that autumn, he switched from the absurdism of that year’s An Englishman in Moscow to total abstraction.

Originally painted in 1915 – further versions were painted in 1923 and 1929, and these two are featured at the Tate as the original is too fragile to be moved – Black Square has been an icon of modern art ever since.

This was the birth of Suprematism.

In an ingenious bit of arrangement, the latest of these is hung high in a corner of one of the exhibition rooms, as the first painting was displayed originally, in a deliberate echo of how icons were often hung in homes.

In the previous room, the 1923 version is hung at a more traditional height and you can sit – back to film footage of a US revival of a Suprematist theatre production, Victory Over the Sun – and take it in.

The Scyther (1911-12)

I’m not going to pretend that it’s a work that I particularly ‘like’, but it has something very powerful about it.

It screams out an eradication of everything that had gone before; wipes the slate clean. Or perhaps it’s a suggestion of a black hole that will swallow everything.

There’s something threatening about it.

It is, I think, the use of the black that makes it so powerful: neither the later Red Square (which gave Martin Cruz Smith the idea for a novel of the same name) nor White on White have anything like the same power.

Malevich declared that the painters of the past were “counterfeiters” of nature, and announced that “the artist can be a creator only when the forms in his picture have nothing in common with nature”.

It was a revolutionary approach.

Morning in the Village After Snowstorm (1912)

At this stage, the exhibition moves into rooms of canvases made up of geometric shapes in various colours.

Frankly, there’s only so much of these sort of works that I can take. They work best when they’re used in the few cups and saucers that are on display.

After the October Revolution, Malevich gradually moved away from these compositions into increasing simplification, with white forms on white backgrounds.

In 1919, he wrote that: “Painting died like the old regime, because it was an organic part of it”.

But as an artist, where do you go after that?

By the late 1920s, the first Five Year Plan was in place to drive industrialisation.

Black Square (1915)

Malevich returned to painting – mainly strange, rural scenes that are reminiscent in some ways of the earlier Cubo-Futurist ones, but with often blank-faced peasant figures.

I did, however, like Landscape With Five Houses (1932) from this period.

The final room gives us some of the final paintings.

The rural scenes continued, but there was also a return to much more conventional painting. Well, sort of.

There are a number of portraits here with strange hand gestures and even costumes that seem straight out of a Renaissance painting.

That he took to signings his works with a black square suggests that he still believed in his own ideas – but that in turn leads to the conclusion that what he later produced was not  ‘genuine’.

Landscape With Five Houses (1932)

Malevich died of cancer in 1935 and, with that, his works disappeared from view in the Soviet Union, failing to meet Stalin’s criteria for art.

The cultural avant garde had long since been viewed as elitist.

Some works re-appeared in Krushchev’s time, but Black Square was not reshown until the 1980s.

This is an interesting exhibition in many ways.

The early works – and the attempt to fashion a particularly Russian form of art – are fascinating.

It’s worth seeing Black Square, not simply because of its iconic value, but also to realise that it is genuinely powerful, whatever your personal response to it is

But after that, the exhibition really all rather peters out.

And after all, once you’ve announced the death of something, how can you really breathe new life into exactly what you claim to have ended?

Art that sweeps away the dust from the soul

Inside the one of the Orangerie's Monet rooms

Commeth the hour, commeth the artist. Saturday dawned in Paris with the expectation of solid rain, but it proved to be reluctant to pitch it down as forecast.

The Other Half went off to hunt for a jacket in one of Paris’s great department stores, while I went to see a woman about a watch on the Ile St Louis.

Grande Nature morte, Picasso

Meeting up again later, we decided to take the opportunity afforded by the continuing dry weather to head down toward the Tuileries, taking a stroll down the Rue du Rivoli.

When we were most of the way there, the rain decided to fall. Fortunately, we were near to the road and to a rather smart-looking eatery with an unsmart name – The Welcome Café.

Since lunch was required, we sat down under the colonnade to wait out the shower with food.

Paul Guillaume by Modigliani

And very pleasant it was too, with both of us opting for an omelette with girolles, which came garnished with chervil, flat leaf parsley and chives, and was washed down with a glass of Chardonnay from the south west of the country.

For all that the establishment was clearly catering largely for a tourist clientele, the kitchen did not make the error of turning the lightly-beaten egg into something solid and dry, but had clearly cooked it for only a minute at the most.

Mrs David would have approved. I most certainly did.

And so to the Musée de l’Orangerie.

Originally built in 1852 to shelter the garden’s orange trees, it later metamorphosed into a temporary display space, before being assigned to house Monet’s eight monumental Nymphéas canvases in 1922, following the suggestion of the artist’s friend, Georges Clémenceau. It opened to the public in 1927.

Paul Guillaume by Derain

In the basement, the gallery houses the Paul Guillaume colllection of late 19th century and early 20th century paintings.

It’s an extraordinary collection by the dealer, including a large number of Renoirs – this was the point at which The Other Half decided we’d seen more of his works than you “could throw a chocolate box at” – plus plenty of works by Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse and others.

Of the ‘others”, this was when at which I concluded that Andre Derain really is overrated – a dilettante, hopping from style to style to style.

Two canvases of harlequins seem to illustrate the point – he simply couldn't make up his mind what he was seeking.

The Matisse works are not his best – being from the ‘awkward’ Nice period, which left his disciples angry and bewildered, as he tried to find his way to the next stage in his artistic journey – but they’re still worth seeing (obviously).

Three Sisters (1917), Matisse

And much the same can be said of the Picasso works there, although a Blue Period couple hugging was well worth seeing, as was a still life, Grande Nature morte (1916-17) that was genuinely Cubist.

There was a sprinkling of Modiglianis – my favourite being a 1915 portrait of Guillaume himself, which knocked one of the same subject by Derain, from 1920, into a cocked hat.

The Other Half was particularly fascinated to discover works by Chaïm Soutine, whose work helped to build the bridge between traditional approaches and expressionist ones.

Le Village (1923) gives an idea of how Soutine viewed the chaos of the modern world, but his portraits are equally interesting, including Le Garçon d’étage (1925).

There are also a number of works by Maurice Utrillo – one of the few famous painters of Montmartre who was actually born there (and died there too).

Le Village, Soutine

We particularly liked La Maison Bernot (1924).

So much for the basement – and well worth the price of admission on its own.

But the two vast, oval rooms that house those Monet canvases, painted in an attempt to find something that would soothe people’s spirits after WWI, are in a different league again.

As I’ve noted previously, I was never particularly ‘in to’ Monet, but these extraordinary canvases made me think again.

Perhaps my lack of interest in them previously was because I’d only seen some of the smaller waterlily paintings in the National Gallery, where the rooms tend to be crowded and you don’t easily get the chance to spend time with the works.

Le Garçon d'étage, Soutine

The Orangerie concentrates the mind.

As you enter the first room, a notice asks you politely to “enjoy quietly”.

And that is precisely what is needed, and the staff enforce it – particularly welcome when a family behind us at one stage decided to start a row about whether they were going back to their hotel or not.

Benches allow you to sit and contemplate the works, and the light and the colour make it easy to get lost in them as they take on a life of their own.

There is something extraordinarily ‘spiritual’ about these works: time spent with them seems to produce something akin to a religious experience.

And it is entirely true to say that their beauty has a soothing quality.

La Maison Bernot, Utrillo

Generally, people are quiet, although an element of disruption can still occur around you. I found it useful to try to ‘play’ Debussy’s Prélude à l’apres-midi d’un faune to myself in my mental concert hall, and it certainly helped to clear the mind.

Monet died before the Orangerie opened for the first time to display these works.

But these career-ending and defining works, inspired by his garden at Giverny and executed as he struggled with cataracts, go well beyond being simple decoration.

Nymphéas detail, Monet

In the summer of 1931, Amédée Ozenfant, the French Cubist painter, writer and co-founder, with Le Corbusier, of the Purist movement, noted in his journal:

“Monet devoted his last years to the poetic series of the Nymphéas ... I found myself taking off my hat.

“When an experience provokes such a decisive reflex, there is no doubt about it; the work is a strong and elevated one.

“In spite of this apparent superficiality, Monet, like Matisse, attained results as elevated as certain severe works.

“The chapel-like presentation, the submarine light, contribute to this strong impression: but, all the same, Monet had something to do with it.”

Or to put it another way, they also put me in mind of Picasso’s comment, that “art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life”.

My view of Monet is changed beyond recognition.

Stanley Spencer and WWI revisionism

Poppies

Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) was an English painter whose work was dominated by two things: his deep religious beliefs and his love of his home village of Cookham, which he often linked, creating Biblical scenes beside the Thames.

In 1915, the Slade-trained artist joined the Royal Army Medical Corps and worked as an orderly at the Beaufort War Hospital, and in 1916, he volunteered to serve with the same unit in Macedonia, where he was later transferred to the infantry.

In the 1920s, the Sandham Memorial Chapel in Burghclere was designed by Lionel Pearson as a memorial to Lieutenant Henry Willoughby Sandham, who had died at the end of the conflict. It was commissioned by his sister and her husband, Mary and Louis Behrend.

A Grade I listed chapel, run by the National Trust, it has views over Watership Down – yes, it really does exist.

And in 1923, Spencer was commissioned by the Behrends to paint a series of scenes for the chapel. They were completed in 1932.

Inspired by Giotto’s Arena Chapel in Padua, Spencer wanted to paint murals too, but the environmental conditions of the English Home Counties mitigated against that, so he stuck with more traditional paintings and completed 19 for the project.

At present, the chapel is being restored and so 16 of the paintings are on display at Somerset House in central London until 26 January.

They will then move to the Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, where they'll be on display from 15 February to 14 June, before returning to the chapel, which will reopen in July.

Although Sandham has come to be a memorial to more than one soldier, Spencer’s choice of subject matter is largely removed from the heat of battle.

The nearest we come is a kit inspection in a Macedonian trench (Dug-Out), and the famous Resurrection of the Soldiers altarpiece in the chapel, and which – along with the two panels that join the rest to the ceiling – is too firmly attached to the chapel walls to be removed.

That painting, where dead soldiers and horses are rising from graves, plain white crosses falling into a heap or presented to Christ, is, in this exhibition, screened onto the wall of a room adjoining the main exhibition area.

Ablution

It was one of the works we studied when I was doing art A’ level – in the days when I disliked pretty much anything that had been painted in the 20th century.

But seeing the paintings now – up close and in good light – was not simply a matter of being impressed by Spencer’s skill with a brush, it was also quietly affecting.

Many of the scenes portray life at the Beaufort War Hospital: scenes of calm domesticity such as making the beds or carrying tea urns.

In one, soldiers are washing, while one has iodine applied to wounds. One washes another’s back, but otherwise, throughout the panels, there is no sense of conversations taking place: the fellowship – camaraderie – between the soldiers is a silent one, and this strange silence seems to reach out from the paintings to the viewer.

In one of the smaller panels, a shell-shocked soldier lies on the floor, obsessively scrubbing, as staff scurry around him. It’s one of the few overt indications of the damage done to men by their experiences at the front.

In another, men sit around a table at the hospital eating sandwiches. Well, one says “men”, but Spencer has painted his men as boys.

His choice of a naïve style leaves them all as boys – including the one officer represented in the entire cycle, who sits astride a horse, gazing down at a map of Macedonia, while troops relax around him in a countryside that is more Cookham. But even that officer looks like a boy.

Their very naïvete may even be read to suggest that expectations about the war and beliefs in its rightness were themselves naive.

It is a poignant comment on the human cost of the war itself and arguably a subtle version of the idea of ‘lions led by donkeys’ – all of which brings it into very sharp focus in light of debates going on about the nature of the war itself as we move closer toward the centenary of the first shots being fired.

Scrubbing the Floor

There are other works included in the exhibition: a self-portrait, for instance, and the magnificent Poppies (1938), which illustrates just how much of a deliberate artistic decision Spencer made in the naïve approach.

But this sits in a wider context.

As we approach the centenary, substantial airtime and column inches have been given to recent accusations of revisionism and left-wing propaganda in terms of our cultural attitude toward it – not least from the current secretary of state for education, Michael Gove.

The troops were not, apparently, ‘lions led by donkeys’ and that popular perception is a myth that has been created by left-wingers.

All of which rather ignores the fact that the historian who is largely credited with creating the idea of the bumbling officer that we recognise from Oh! What a Lovely War and Blackadder IV - was one Alan Clark, also a Conservative politician, who penned a 1961 title, The Donkeys.

In an interesting article in the Times Educational Supplement, John Blake writes:

“What Haig and the other commanders lacked was experience with the new weapons of war. These increased the killing power of an individual soldier to such an extent that offensive tactics that had previously been relatively safe became lethal: jogging in a pack across an open field in the face of machine gun fire is quite a different proposition from doing it against single-cartridge Martini-Henry rifles.”

That’s debatable, because the British Army had decided that ordinarysoldiers were not going to be given the most up-to-date rifles, because they’d use too many bullets too quickly.

Blake also states: “The reason the infantry was asked to walk across the Somme battlefield was to ensure that they arrived at the German lines together and thus were not slaughtered one by one as they climbed into the enemy trenches.”

And the British had already had experience of trench warfare in the Anglo-Boer War, so that should have presented few surprises.

But even if his explanation for the officers making the soldiers walk toward the German trenches is correct – and I have no reason to doubt it – it doesn’t make it any the less crass and negligent.

Machine guns were not new technology by this time: the Gatling gun had been used by Union forces in the 1860s in the American Civil War. Even pigeon post would have got the news of its efficacy across The Pond in rather less than half a century, so Blake is being disingenuous in pretending that the use of machine guns in WWI could not have been expected.

Elsewhere in cyberspace (and thanks to Dave for this), comes this: “One of the most striking things I have retained in my memory of watching numerous documentaries and reading various accounts over the years on WWI was the sad tale of one particular British Army Captain who, on receiving his orders for the forthcoming attack, worked out that, given the positions of the enemy and line of attack he was being ordered to take, he and his men were all going to get killed.

Map Reading

“What is more, he also worked out some sort of alternative flanking approach that would achieve the objective which would not have meant certain death (though I am sure he didn't think it was risk free either!).

“On presenting all this to his commander he was ordered to stick to the original plan and do his duty. He did and was killed.”

And then, of course, there was decision to launch one last attack, 10 minutes before the armistice. What does that show if not a disregard for the life of the men under your command?

There is more complexity to the history of WWI than is popularly remembered – but that is almost certainly true of all history.

For instance, I would certainly not doubt that many if not most people at the time did consider it a ‘just cause’. But there’s no conflict between that and anyone now saying, with the benefit of hindsight, that it was not.

What is disturbing about the current attempts at revisionism is not even that they appear to be partly about scoring political points – and ignoring facts, as illustrated above – but that given a background of British military adventurism in recent years and the current prime minister’s desire last year to get more militarily involved in Syria (thankfully defeated), one cannot help but be concerned that the two are linked and that our leaders believe that we, as a nation, need to be prepared for involvement in further conflicts, thus requiring a narrative of ‘just wars’ fought and glory gained, with great leaders at the helm, rather than anything different.

In terms of Syria, secretary of state William Hague (sounds remarkably like ‘Haig’) even attempted to suggest that, in that civil war, we could get involved without taking sides – after bigging up the rebels as though they were some sort of saints and the Syrian situation as beautifully simplistic.

In the meantime, Spencer’s quiet paintings act as a continuing reminder of those lost. There might have been a respite in the hospital for many, but there was no ultimate respite for millions, and no resurrection for those who fell – just as there are no officers among those rising from the dead in Spencer’s altarpiece and handing their crosses to Christ.

Perhaps in that simple artistic fact lies a truth that was well understood at the time.

These paintings are well worth seeing – and not least as people try to wage ideological war over how we portray and see the sacrifices made by so many.

They take a very different approach to, say, Paul Nash’s blistered landscapes or the poetry of Sassoon, Owen and others.

But I doubt that many will see them and not be quite profoundly moved.

Further reading

An interesting look at what might have happened if Germany had won WWI.

The Spencer exhibition and Michael Gove’s comments.

Death in Vienna

Portrait of Ria Munk III, Klimt

In the beginning is Beethoven and in the beginning is the end.

The National Gallery’s new exhibition, Facing the Modern: The portrait in Vienna 1900, is, on the surface, a look at the portraiture of the cultural centre of fin-de-siècle Mitteleuropa.

This is not, though, a city of Strauss waltzes, but a haunting look at a clash of old and modern, life and death, at Europe’s heart.

We start with the mask of Beethoven’s face taken after his death in 1827.

The cast is not the finest: so scared was he of poisoning that he insisted that his demise should be followed by a postmortem. Both the damage done by that process and by the time lapse between death and the casting mean that the ‘final expression’ – the aim of a death mask – has been blurred.

Yet still it retains power; a face pinched by pain or the fire that always consumed the composer.

This is all context: the absorption with death that becomes pronounced as we encounter later works started long before the works that constitute the core of this exhibition and before Freud, whose own work seems to hang over the paintings.

Contextually too, Beethoven was one of the fathers of German romanticism. Like the artists of the Vienna Secession, whose work follows, Beethoven kicked down the old and created a new artistic language.

The Secession understood this and its 14^th exhibition was dedicated to the composer.

The exhibition has left some critics grumbling about the context of that mask, and about how the exhibition as a whole is arranged – in other words, not chronologically. But this has benefits for the visitor.

For instance, seeing Oskar Kokoschka’s 1909 Portrait of Lotte Franzos hanging right next to Hans Canon’s Girl with a Parrot from 1876, presents an unusual opportunity to grasp what a shock the modern must have been to a public weaned on an art form that was as constrained by convention as society itself.

We move through rooms covering different themes, from initial context to the family to Jewish identity in the city to death.

The Family (Self Portrait), Shiele

Although Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Kokoschka are well represented here, the exhibition has brought together work by a number of other artists, including Jewish and female ones, to create a wider picture

The presence of works by Teresa Ries (a self portrait of great self-confidence), Broncia Koller and Elena Luksch-Makowsky all make the point that women were involved at the highest levels of artist endeavour and were exhibiting as such. It’s subsequently that they appear to have been largely forgotten.

But death is a dominant theme here: so often the outcome as the modern and the old collided; as anti-semitism rubbed against the flowering of secular Jewish artists, intellectuals and businessmen; as Vienna became a magnet for émigrés from central and eastern Europe; as liberalism collided with conservatism; as people started to question religious conventions and social mores, and as individualism warred with the subjugation of the id in the name of society and family.

But to begin with, there is death and convention.

Passing through the rooms, we discover Friedrich von Amerling’s Antonie von Amerling on her Deathbed from 1843, Franz Eybl’s The Artist Franz Wipplinger, Looking at a Portrait of his Late Sister, from 1833, Gyula Benczúr’s Portrait of Empress Elisabeth from 1899 (painted a year after she was assassinated, and representing her some 40 years earlier, portrayed against a stunningly-realised background of gold) and even Emperor Franz Joseph on his Deathbed, by Franz von Matsch from 1916.

There’s work by Richard Gerstl, who killed himself when 25, after a short affair with Schönberg’s wife, and was only later recognised as a seminal Austrian Expressionist.

Of the Klimt works, while two early ones are astonishing for their photographic quality, the latter ones exhibited here all seem connected to death.

A deathbed portrait of Ria Munk (1912), after she had shot herself in the heart, aged 24, following an affair, sets the scene for one of two posthumous portraits of her that is displayed here.

And then a pastel of Klimt’s dead infant son, Otto Zimmermann, together with a photograph of the child in a coffin.

Such postmortem photographs were so popular in the Vienna of the time that the government enacted a law banning the presence of corpses in photographic studios.

Portrait of Amalie Zuckerkandl was being worked on even as Austro-Hungrary itself was in its death throes, and was unfinished when Klimt himself died in 1918.

As if reflecting those ends, you look at this work and sense that you know where Klimt’s characteristic gold would have gone, but while the spaces are there, they remain ungilded.

But death had not had its fill of this portrait: Zuckerkandl herself would later be murdered in a Nazi death camp.

And then there is Schiele.

Ah yes: this notoriously ‘difficult’ artist.

The Family (Self Portrait) dominates a room – light years away from the chocolate-box sentiment of Alois Delug’s The Markl Family (1907) that hangs just a few metres from it (another illustration of how effective the design of the exhibition is in presenting stark contrasts).

Schiele’s gaunt figures, blank-eyed, stripped almost of flesh and with brushstrokes that could be the underlying muscles; angular, and devoid of what the artist considered to be aesthetic hypocrisy, seem to be the perfect visual metaphors for a Europe brutalised and shattered by the war that was finally grinding to an exhausted halt.

Death mask of Gustav Mahler

Later, there is Schiele’s Portrait of Edith Schiele, dying, from 1918 – just days before his own death, also from the Spanish flu.

And more death masks follow, like a frame of the exhibition: of Klimt, of Schiele, of architect Adolf Loos and of the composer Gustav Mahler.

The latter, made in 1911, is unusual in that it was cast by an artist, Carl Moll, and includes much of Mahler’s head and neck as well as his face. The detail is staggering: eyelashes and pores on the neck: it as though you are looking at the composer himself, sleeping.

There are aspects of this exhibition that seem full of life as opposed to death.

Moll’s Self Portrait in his Study, from 1906, may on the surface be conventional, but it has some interesting touches and is beautifully executed.

Gerstl’s Portrait of Lieutenant Alois Gerstl (1907) seems to have something of both van Gogh and Chagall about it.

Schiele’s Portrait of Albert Paris von Gütersloh (1918) has the same blank look of The Family (Self Portrait) from the same year, but his subject sits, utterly modern, against a red and gold background that recalls to mind the icons of Orthodoxy.

There are other patches of the gold that is so familiar in the work of the Secession, as behind the head of the subject in Koller’s Nude Portrait of Marietta (1907), but also in Isidor Kaufmann’s Young Rabbi (1910).

Anton Romoko’s portraits of Isabella and Christoph Reisser from 1885 both hint at the same thing in their blank backgrounds, while some of Kokoschka’s earlier backgrounds do something similar, with their mix of reds and golds.

It is the exoticism of the East blurring into the West.

Portrait of Heinrich Mann, Oppenheimer

Max Oppenheimer’s Portrait of Heinrich Mann from 1910 obviously attracted my attention as a fan of Lübeck’s literary family.

There’s the discovery that Arnold Schönberg was not only the creator of the 12-tone scale, but a painter of some note.

Works by Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller from the pre-Secession era show, however, that not every artist was trapped completely in conventionality.

Gerstl’s Nude Self Portrait with Palette from 1908 (the year of his suicide) is striking too – not least for its apparent prefiguring of Schiele’s angularising of the human body.

And the exhibition as a whole is fascinating because it offers the chance to see how European artists outside France and Spain (Matisse and Picasso, in other words) explored, dissected and made the anew.

If I have a quibble, it is the odd way in which sex is treated – or rather: not.

It’s skated around: mentions that Klimt fathered a number of children by several mothers, and of painters and subjects and their affairs.

One can, in Schiele’s 1912 Portrait of Erich Lederer (left), even see a harbinger of Weimar androgyny.

Yet Koller’s Nude Portrait of Marietta is the point at which the curator chooses to inform of us that it is ‘different’ from other nudes of the era in being ‘non-sexual’.

Which is one interesting – not least, as, in our time, we seem increasingly to be seeing any nude as sexual: see the moral panics that have been thrown up by pictures of naked children being snatched by the police and the photographers arrested, even when they are the parents.

Yet there seems also in this an attempted rejection of the fact that human beings are also sexual beings. However much some may try to pretend otherwise, we view our fellow humans at least partially in terms of sex.

In fin-de-siècle Vienna, as in so many other places and at other times when conventions were being torn at, the rejection of sexual conformity was a vital part of that. And in a Freudian world, and one where individuality is being explored and old beliefs dumped, this seems even more the case.

In Schiele’s oeuvre it’s impossible to miss this.

In 2007, at the Barbican’s Seduced: Art and sex from antiquity to now, works by both Schiele and Klimt were included.

It’s difficult to see how, for instance, Schiele’s Two Girls Embracing (1915) can be seen as pornographic – the gaze from the two women is a challenge to the viewer as voyeur. And Eros, from 1911, of a male nude with vast, erect penis and, again, a challenging look at the observer, does not seem intended to arouse.

Perhaps, rather, they confuse in their lack of shame, and the frankness and boldness of that challenge.

But if Nude Portrait of Marietta is a portrait, then so, surely, is Eros.

That is, however, a relatively minor quibble.

If you expect a Vienna of gaiety and Strauss, this may not be for you. But Facing the Modern is an intellectually challenging exhibition and one that brings great rewards on that score. Gemma Blackshaw deserves great credit for her work on it.

And it’s also an exhibition that will, I suspect, stay in the mind for a very long time to come.

• Facing the Modern: The portrait in Vienna 1900 is at the National Gallery, London, until 12 January. Find out more here.