Volume 27, Number 5 · April 3, 1980
Looking for the Exit
By John Willett
Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture
by Carl E. Schorske
Knopf, 378 pp., $15.95
This winter the Royal Academy in London has been holding a large, beautiful, and instructive exhibition, under the loose title 'Post-Impressionism,' whose impact seems likely to change many people's map of the arts. It is an exhibition which suggests the European background Carl Schorske only touches on in his essays on Vienna—and which could have been stronger if it had taken account of the artistic developments traced in Schorske's book. Organized by Alan Bowness, backed by IBM money, and underwritten for insurance purposes by the last Labour government, it provided a large cross-section of much that was going on in European painting from the emergence of Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, and Van Gogh—those four amazing offspring of the Impressionism of the mid-1870s—to the first awkward stirrings of the Fauves and the German Expressionists around 1905.
Review, 3716 words
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