A fine line

摘要

An excuse to show erotic nudes in the name of art? Certainly, that is what the Viennese bourgeoisie believed around 1900, when Gustav Klimt, followed a few years later by Egon Schiele and Oskar Ko-koschka, began to present the human figure stripped of its wrapping of mythology and allegory: a naked object of wonder, pity and maybe lust. Now the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt has brought together some of the finest intimate, and occasionally erotic, works by these three painters, and a few others. It also aims to show the impact they had on turn-of-the-century Vienna, when the city was a place of Catholic prurience and rococo elegance.