Course: Viennese Artists, 3 weeks

When people think of psychology and Vienna, they usually think of Sigmund Freud. But psychological research had taken place in Vienna for two centuries before Freud. He was the beneficiary of a long tradition which included the extraordinary Franz Xaver Messerschmidt and Franz Mesmer, who gave his name to ‘mesmerism’. The first talk in this series will address the psychological life of Vienna, leading up to Freud, and the many fascinating traces it left in the arts. These will include the beguiling reveries of Gustav Klimt.

Fin-de-siecle Vienna was a crucible of innovation and experiment. Klimt and Mahler were its passionate and romantic giants. Elsewhere in Europe, avant-garde art was often abstract but, in Vienna, it was the boundaries of sexual propriety that were breached. Egon Schiele was the main offender.

Klimt and Schiele both died in 1918, but the tradition of Viennese modernism underwent its own uneasy development well…