Visionaries, alleged pornographers, artists of enduring repute -- Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele both died in 1918. With them ended the first flowering of the Vienna Secession, an artistic movement that declared war on the Establishment in the cause of liberty and modernity. "Der Zeit ihre Kunst (Art for the Era)," proclaimed the group, which formed in the then Austro-Hungarian capital in 1897. "Der Kunst ihre Freiheit (Freedom in Art)," it demanded.

As if to vindicate the Secessionists' call for artistic liberty, the authorities moved swiftly to censor the neo-Mycenaean poster designed by Klimt to advertise the group's debut exhibition in 1898. The stylized composition featured a lean -- and naked -- Theseus, his sword poised to run through the cowering Minotaur. The censor demanded that the hero's genitalia be concealed, and Klimt reluctantly interposed two trees, their trailing branches resembling spilled ink, defacing the original design.

Side by side, the before-and-after posters hang at the start of "The Vienna Secession 1898-1918," a comprehensive and attractively staged exhibition on display at the Bunkamura Museum of Art in Shibuya till Feb. 24.

"The show was a challenge to present," explains the Bunkamura's resident curator, Masao Miyazawa, "because the Secession includes so many influences. They invited many other groups, such as French Impressionists, to participate in their exhibitions. Showing all that is confusing, but it's the reality of that time in Vienna."

The well-organized display imposes some order on this chaos, but it is nonetheless startling when Jugendstil (Art Nouveau) poster designs and hieratic images such as Wilhelm List's "St. Elisabeth" give way to a room of Impressionist canvases. This then opens out into a wall of interior designs by Charles Rennie Mackintosh that faces a podium of Viennese furniture produced under his influence. Round the corner from a showcase of elegant cover illustrations for the Secession journal "Ver Sacrum (Sacred Spring)" hangs a group of livid nudes by Schiele.

So where, then, to begin? A perfect expression of the Secessionists' ideals is to be found in the form and function of their headquarters, designed by Josef Maria Olbrich, erected in 1898 and still standing today. A model of the building occupies the center of the first exhibition room. Its white walls and spare Grecian ornamentation were designed to evoke Classical simplicity -- the critic Hermann Bahr wrote that to enter the building was to be cleansed of earthly sordidness and prepared for the eternal. The interior, however, comprised the first "gallery" as we know it today. Artworks were displayed on plain walls, well-lit, in partitionable spaces that were used to host exhibitions curated along thematic lines.

Classicism and Modernism combined? For the Secessionists, it all made perfect sense. Schiele was to declare that there was only one artistic style, undergoing a perpetual rebirth.

The Secession artists switched with ease between depicting contemporary subjects and those from the threshold where history meets fable. In the Bunkamura's second room, Fernand Khnopff's "Sleeping Medusa" (1896) drowses at dusk, while next to her hangs the artist's 1898 chalk study of a violinist, a poised modern woman with a level gaze. The room is dominated by Klimt's radiantly mythic "Pallas Athene," the canvas framed in beaten copper and hung against golden mesh. In a recess, however, is the same artist's 1898 sketch of a naked woman arched across a rumpled sheet, his pencil lines as gaunt and sparing as her frame.

Best-known today for the gilded eroticism of "The Kiss" (1907-8), Klimt produced early works that laid bare the rawer side of life -- and love. Perceptive critics remarked that sexual subjects -- such as the 1905 "Two Nudes Embracing," displayed here -- produced some of the artist's finest drawings, but others were not so appreciative. A series of monumental paintings commissioned by Vienna University proved so outrageous when previewed at Secession exhibitions in 1900 and 1901 that their "obscenity" was debated in parliament.

Graphic representation of the human form was one way in which the Secessionists asserted the relevance of art to life. Another was the principle of Gesamtkunstwerk (total art work) that strove to bring beauty to functional items. Like William Morris, who in 1880 had urged people to "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful," the Secessionists believed that a combination of beauty and utility was the highest good.

The items displayed here, most notably a striking black-and-white checkered armchair (1903) by Koloman Moser and a reclining "Sitting Machine" (1905) by Josef Hoffmann, together with design sketches made by the two, show Vienna taking creative cues from Morris' Arts and Crafts movement in Britain with a flair that would, in turn, inspire Walter Gropius's Bauhaus of 1919-33.

Though the clean lines of Mackintosh and his Viennese imitators and admirers still seem fresh to us today, the masterpieces of French Impressionism are so familiar as to have become an artistic cliche, reproduced ad infinitum on greetings cards, posters and in cheap prints. It is an achievement of this exhibition, therefore, to restore even this overexposed genre to a little of its initial, revolutionary impact.

"For the people of Vienna," Miyazawa explains, "French Impressionism was very new. Paris was the art center at that time."

One wall of this exhibition name-checks the greats who exhibited at the Secession: Claude Monet, Edouard Manet, Pierre Bonnard, Paul Signac. But not everything is what it seems. That Monet painting of Giverny you saw from across the room? Closer inspection reveals it to be "Taormina in the Sunshine," a 1905 work by Johann Victor Kramer. Same goes for the Manet lookalike "My Living-room" (1903), by Carl Moll; the pastel, pointillist "The Danube Canal" (1903), by Franz Jaschke; and a cherubic chalk study of "Maria Moll" (1902) that, were it not for a catalog credit to Klimt, one would swear was from the hand of Renoir. Even if you are no fan of Impressionist paintings, this evidence of how they were admired and copied decades later will at least give pause for thought.

While some Secessionists were little more than skilled imitators, the figure of Schiele stands out as the movement's true original. Admitted to the elite Akademie der Bildenden Künste in 1906, he came into immediate conflict with the tradition-bound instruction he received there. By 1907 he was in contact with Klimt, and within a few years his works were showing at the Secession exhibitions. With fellow artists he shared sources of inspiration (which included Japanese woodblock prints), but the urgent, psychological tension of his work is a world away from the decorative Jugendstil still current among his peers.

For all that, Schiele was hailed as a successor to Klimt -- his work perhaps recalling the master's raw, early nudes. Instead, Schiele survived the master by just seven months, dying of Spanish flu at the age of 28. The same year saw the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire itself, following its defeat in World War I. The final picture in this exhibition shows the Secession building being used as a hospital.

The building survived -- and so did the Secession, still active today and still not shy of controversy in the choice of artists it hosts and exhibits. But the gallery is now part museum, and the movement never again produced an artist of stature to rival its founder and his erstwhile protege. Having turned its versatile hand to all schools of art, the Secession itself left none behind.