There are two paintings of artist's studios that say it all. The first is part castle, part Old Curiosity Shop, packed with statues, bearskins and whatnot, where a successful Viennese artist of the old school sits in gloomy splendor. The second is filled with light. There is no artist, but a woman's silky dress drapes over a white wooden chair. Just two decades separate them, but between 1880 and 1900 Vienna's artists swept away the cobwebs and shook the world.
"Vienna, Life and Art," at Fuchu Art Museum in western Tokyo, reflects the vibrant city of Klimt, Freud and Mahler from 1873 to 1938, through oil paintings, silverware, furnishings and graphic arts, mainly from Vienna's Museum of History.
The exhibition opens with an impressive panorama of the Vienna World Fair, held during six months in 1873. The site, with its grand central rotunda and orderly pavilions, is symbolic of the era, and of the optimism for international trade and the development of science and the arts.