Schiele, Kokoschka and the interwar years
Around 1910 the young in Vienna turned against Klimt’s gold. Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka painted naked, restless bodies and souls. After the war Vienna became a Social Democratic city with great housing projects, until Nazism put an end to it in 1938.
The Kunstschau exhibition of 1908 was a breakthrough for the youngest. Oskar Kokoschka, then twenty-two, showed his colourful illustrations and was soon writing plays and painting portraits meant to show the inner life of his sitters. Egon Schiele, whom Klimt had encouraged, developed a draughtsmanlike style with gaunt, angular bodies and self-portraits in which he twists in pain or ecstasy. Richard Gerstl painted wild, loose portraits before taking his own life the same year.
The First World War and its end changed everything. In 1918 Klimt, Otto Wagner, Koloman Moser and Egon Schiele died. The monarchy fell, and Austria became a small republic. Albin Egger-Lienz painted soldiers as a faceless mass, and after the war painters such as Herbert Boeckl and Anton Kolig sought a heavy, colourful Expressionism, while others took up the New Objectivity.
Vienna was governed by the Social Democrats from 1919, and Red Vienna built some sixty thousand homes in large courtyard blocks such as the Karl-Marx-Hof. At the School of Arts and Crafts pupils of Franz Cižek developed an abstract art of their own, Kineticism, and Otto Neurath and Gerd Arntz created the pictorial language Isotype. After the civil war of 1934 the country became a dictatorship, and when Germany annexed Austria in 1938 Jewish and modern artists were persecuted and many were forced into exile.