The Art of Two Metropolises from Schiele to Grosz, Vienna, Belvedere, 2014 Spring

Text: György Szegő

Georg Grosz: The Rythm of the Street, 1918 © Belvedere

After 1945 Paris launched a series of comparative exhibitions of painters from New York which is continued by the 2007 Wien–Paris exhibition of the Belvedere. This time it was an act of free will, as by now the first one has turned out to have been be mainly organised by the CIA. A real sensation was the exhibition in 1995 titled Berlin-Moscow 1900-1950 which surveyed the mutual influences of Russian–Soviet and German arts, the „great” cultural interrelations of the 20th century. The spring exhibition of the Belvedere offers no sensation in this sense, but obviously and spectacularly emphasises the parallels and differences of the cultural revolutions of the two German-speaking metropolises. The more than four decades it spans starts in the 1890s of Art Nouveau and ends when the Nazis came to power.