Austria

About

Austrian art gained its first wide fame with late Gothic carvers such as Michael Pacher, whose gilded altarpiece at St. Wolfgang was finished in 1481. After the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683, a building boom produced Baroque showpieces such as Melk Abbey and Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach's Karlskirche. Nineteenth-century Biedermeier painters like Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller favoured sunlit, exact scenes of ordinary life.

Around 1900 Vienna became a laboratory. The Secession, founded in 1897, gathered Gustav Klimt, whose gold-leafed The Kiss (1907–08) became its emblem, and Koloman Moser and Josef Hoffmann, who went on to found the Wiener Werkstätte workshops. Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka pushed toward raw, nervous Expressionism. After 1945, the Viennese Actionists staged bodily performances, Arnulf Rainer painted over his own photographs, and Maria Lassnig and Franz West found new ways to render the body.