Gothic Modern

ALBERTINA MUSEUM, VIENNA

The conventional idea of modernism is as a fundamental break with tradition. It is thus that little attention has been paid to the way in which deliberate recourse to the distant past of the Late Middle Ages played a central role in precisely that reinvention of art that took place around 1900.

This exhibition shines a spotlight on a development that took place between 1870 and 1920 in which numerous artists such as Edvard Munch, Vincent van Gogh, Käthe Kollwitz, Max Beckmann, and Otto Dix deliberately referred back to the expressive art of figures such as Holbein, Dürer, Cranach, and Baldung Grien. Encounters with medieval aesthetics elicited intense emotions and afforded artists new ways of engaging with the fundamental questions of human existence. This ALBERTINA exhibition inimitably unites modernist masterpieces with those of the 15th and early 16th centuries.

The exhibition is on view from 19 September 2025 until 11 January 2026.