See rare and fragile drawings by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, offering intimate insights into their artistic relationship and differing creative processes. This extraordinary collaboration with the Albertina Museum in Vienna marks the centenary of both artists’ deaths.
This exhibition contains some adult content. Please ask a member of staff for further information.
1918 was a seismic year in Vienna. As the Austro-Hungarian Empire crumbled, an intense period of creative vitality drew to an end with the deaths of two of its foremost artists. One was the preeminent and strikingly modern painter of fin-de-siècle Vienna, Gustav Klimt; the other the young, scandalous and prodigiously talented Egon Schiele. Both revelled in the immediacy of drawing, an ideal medium for exploring new ideas of modernity, subjectivity and the erotic.
Klimt / Schiele: Drawings is a unique opportunity to see extraordinary drawings produced by both artists, considered to be some of the 20th century’s most important works on paper. Among them are Klimt’s sketches for his seminal Beethoven Frieze, and unflinching self-portraits by Schiele, which due to their delicacy will not see the light of day again for many years. In around 100 portraits, allegories, landscapes and erotic nudes, prepare to encounter these two icons of early Modernism at their most raw and revealing.
Exhibition organised by the Royal Academy of Arts, London and the Albertina Museum, Vienna.
