Poster (detail) by Toulouse-Lautrec, 1893 (Hermitage State Museum)
The year 1900 found three of Europe’s greatest cities entering defining eras in their historical and cultural development. In a richly illustrated program, cultural historian George Scheper explores how the alignment of creative forces shaped a trio of highly distinctive urban milieus—each nourished by the energy and excitement of new ideas and each witnessing the birth of modernism in the coming century.
Scheper is a senior lecturer in advanced academic programs at Johns Hopkins University.
10–11:30 a.m. Fin-de-Siècle Vienna
Vienna in 1900 witnessed an explosion of creativity in music, art, literature, philosophy, and science. The dramatic shifts from traditional to avant-garde forms of expression played out in the coffee houses, salons, galleries, and concert halls. Seminal figures included Otto Wagner, the architect whose work ranged from industrial styles to art nouveau to modernist designs; Gustav Klimt, the most renowned of Vienna’s rebellious secessionist artists; Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka, part of the recent wave of secessionists who further pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable to the city’s middle class; and Adolf Loos, the modernist architect who argued that “ornament is crime.”
11:45 a.m.–1:15 p.m. Belle Époque Paris
Paris became the city of romantic imagination at the turn of the last century. The broad and open boulevards at its center, products of Baron von Haussmann’s ambitious modernization plan begun in the middle of the 19th century, provided the city with theaters, concert halls, cafes, and vibrant street life. The posters and paintings of Toulouse-Lautrec, the urban scenes of great Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters, and the works of symbolist poets and artists created other new aesthetic worlds. A series of world’s fairs, culminating in the Exposition Universelle of 1900, celebrated the globalized economy along with astounding technological innovations, such as electricity, that would radically transform the new century.
1:15–1:45 p.m. Break
1:45–3:15 p.m. Imperial London
The British Empire was at its height in 1900—although the signs of imminent decline can be seen in retrospect. Earlier in the 19th century critic Walter Pater and the Pre-Raphaelites tried to temper England’s headlong rush into industrial technology and commercialism with alternative aesthetic sensibilities. The elegant residential squares, parks, and clubs of London reflected a world of complacent stability, yet the docks and working-class neighborhoods of the city already foreshadowed class conflicts and current naturalistic realities. Voices expressing robust imperial points of view, as in the poetry of Rudyard Kipling, were counterbalanced by the sharp social criticism and satire of writers such as G. B. Shaw and Oscar Wilde and by the expressive realism of modernist painters such as Walter Sickert, Augustus John, and Vanessa Bell.
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