Tension Lines

In today's Independent on Sunday, ahead of the National Gallery's Facing the Modern: The Portrait in Vienna 1900, I ponder whether the fin de siècle was really as indolent and honeyed a period as Merchant Ivory would have us believe. Surely we've even got the name wrong – fin de siècle – it wasn't an ending, it was a beginning. Indeed Freud was so keen for Die Traumdeutung to be part of the 20th century that the first edition of his great polemic was dated 1900, though it was published in 1899. Binning nostalgic ideas of 'a careless time, a peaceful time, when summer looked set to last forever and everyone was blind to the cataclysm looming over the horizon', I look instead at the tensions and anxieties evident in the portraits and artefacts, such as Mahler's death mask, featured in the NG's exciting new show. Click here to read the article.

Anton Sandig's plaster death mask of Gustav Mahler (1911)
Image © Wien Museum

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