LEOPOLD MUSEUM SHOWS “HIDDEN MODERNISM”

10.09.2025

First Comprehensive Exhibition in Austria on Occultist Tendencies and Life Reformist Aspirations Around 1900

Hidden Modernism. The Fascination with the Occult in Vienna Around 1900, the Leopold Museum’s large-scale autumn exhibition, offers a first comprehensive overview of the occult, life reformist milieu in Vienna around 1900, and shines the spotlight on subcultures that oriented themselves on spiritualistic and theosophical doctrines. By delving into this era shaped by a search for alternatives, the exhibition highlights many parallels to the present day, which is equally characterized by the quest for a better future and hidden (“occult”) truths.

As a countermovement to the materialism of the Gründerzeit era, and inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke’s maxim “You must change your life!”, people staked a claim, of great utopian potential, for renewal and realization, which went hand in hand with the search for a “new humanity” and each individual’s unimpeded development.
Hans-Peter Wipplinger, Director of the Leopold Museum

The social development in Europe at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century was shaped by rapid progress in engineering and science. This dynamic pace of everyday life often collided with constrictive conventions. Responding to the negative impacts of urbanization, many heeded the call “back to nature!”. The founding of women’s and youth movements, the upsurge in mountaineering and naturism, the increasing importance of vegetarianism, the propagation of reform clothing, as well as new forms of dance and gymnastics, were all expressions of society’s changing physical awareness and attitude towards life.

“I am a wanderer and mountain-climber, I love not the plains. And whatever may still overtake me as fate and experience – a wandering will be therein, and a mountain-climbing: in the end one experienceth only oneself.” Viennese occultists like the theosopher Friedrich Eckstein took these words by Friedrich Nietzsche to heart. Their meeting place in Vienna’s inner city, Café Griensteidl, was dubbed the Alpinists’ café, as the writers, esotericists and artists gathering there were united by their love of hiking and climbing, for instance at the Rax south of Vienna.
Matthias Dusini, curator of the exhibition

The exhibition also highlights the dark sides of these reformist aspirations. The misogynistic publicist Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, for instance, paved the way for esotericism to take an ethnic-popular turn. As the founder of “Ariosophy”, he anticipated aspects of National Socialist ideology.

Already in Theosophy, the aspiration for a universal fraternization of humanity went hand in hand with a racial theory that called for the primacy of the so-called “Aryan race”. Ethnic tendencies within the life reform movement propagated the rejection of anything that supposedly contradicted “people’s natural national character”, causing it to be defamed as “degenerate”. Far-right racist esotericism cast an unmistakable shadow over this period especially in Vienna.
Ivan Ristić, curator of the exhibition

Wagner and Nietzsche – Temples for Art

The exhibition trains the spotlight on two figureheads of occult Modernism, Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche, who were both great innovators of the Gründerzeit era. The enthusiasm for the work of the composer and poet permeated all areas of cultural life. The ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or universal work of art, proclaimed by him was of vital importance to the Vienna Secessionists surrounding Gustav Klimt. Leading architects of the Secession pursued the idea of erecting temples for art, among them Otto Wagner and Joseph Maria Olbrich, who designed the laurel-crowned Secession building. Friedrich Nietzsche demanded that Christian morality, as well as science’s claim to truth, had to be overcome. His nihilistic doubts about the meaningfulness of existence led him towards the idea of the “New Man”.

Artist Prophets: Diefenbach, Fidus, Gräser

One of the admirers of Richard Wagner’s was the painter Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach. The eccentric artist prophet and pioneer of nudism propagated abstinence from alcohol and meat, and a healthy lifestyle in tune with nature. In Vienna, he founded communes, whose members included the art critic Arthur Roessler, the painter František Kupka and Gusto Gräser, an artist and co-founder of the Swiss reform commune “Monte Verità”, whose chief work The Power of Love is shown in the exhibition. Hugo Höppener was Diefenbach’s favorite student. The master gave him the artist’s name Fidus (“the faithful”) as an expression of his gratitude for the fact that, when they had both been sentenced to time in prison for practicing nudism, Höppener served not only his own term but his teacher’s as well.

Occultist Tendencies in Vienna

Unlike Paris or Leipzig, Vienna was not among the centers of occultism. The esoteric doctrines of the Russian-German writer Helena Blavatsky nevertheless reached the vegetarian restaurants in Vienna’s inner city. A protagonist of this circle was Friedrich Eckstein, the founder of the Vienna lodge of the Theosophical Society. The polymath and exponent of scientific occultism moved in the circles of the composer Gustav Mahler, the founder of Anthroposophy Rudolf Steiner, the co-founder of the Austrian Social Democratic Workers’ Party Victor Adler and the mathematician Oskar Simony.

Spiritism, Hypnosis and Dream Worlds

The practice known as “spirit rapping”, which had been imported from the US, was seen as a way of entering into contact with the deceased via a medium. A spirit rapping hand from a fairground stall at the Vienna Prater is one of the most curious objects featured in the exhibition. Proponents of spiritism with an interest in science were confident that journeys into the beyond, levitations and automatic writing would soon be explained through innovations like electricity, radio technology or X-rays. In spiritistic séances, people hoped to tap into spheres that are normally inaccessible to the human senses. The mediums, who were mostly women, acted in somnambulistic states, among them Gertrude Honzatko-Mediz, who created her images in a state of trance to instructions from her deceased mother. Dream dancers, like Magdeleine Guipet from Paris, meanwhile, drew huge crowds.

Fluid Figures and Radiation Affording Vital Energy

Artists with an affinity for the occult created works of psychological depth and visionary power. This can be experienced in the exhibition through the fluid figures of Edvard Munch and the dissecting introspective images by the Austrian Expressionists Richard Gerstl, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka and Max Oppenheimer, who rendered the protagonists of their paintings as auratic apparitions.

Abstraction and Occultism

It is almost impossible to image the emergence of abstract painting without the influences of occult writings. The landscape paintings created by the writer August Strindberg encouraged the composer Arnold Schönberg to also try his hand at painting. Select works by František Kupka, Wassily Kandinsky and Johannes Itten illustrate this new art’s occultist-inspired paths into abstraction.

New Heights

The new life was to be shaped by a novel physical awareness and an enthusiasm for outdoor activities. For many, mountaineering became a way of life. Alpinists, including the pedagogue Eugen Guido Lammer, administered themselves the “morphine of danger” (Lammer) by exploring new summits in death-defying climbs. Ferdinand Hodler’s rendering A View to Infinity shows a naked youth high above the cloud-covered valleys on the peak of a mountain, epitomizing the “New Man” who has risen above all earthly hardships.

The exhibition showcasing this “alternative” Modernism features around 180 works by more than 80 artists – among them Maria Cyrenius, Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach, Richard Gerstl, Gusto Gräser, Ferdinand Hodler, Hugo Höppener (Fidus), Johannes Itten, Wassily Kandinsky, Albert von Keller, Fernand Khnopff, Erika Giovanna Klien, Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, František Kupka, Gabriel von Max, Koloman Moser, Edvard Munch, Max Oppenheimer, Gertraud Reinberger-Brausewetter, Egon Schiele, Arnold Schönberg, August Strindberg, Otto Wagner and My Ullmann – and covers a period from the 1860s into the 1930s. It further includes photographs, posters, books, manuscripts as well as display items, such as gymnastics apparatuses and clothing.

Curators: Matthias Dusini, Ivan Ristić

The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue in German and English in separate editions, featuring essays by Karl Baier, Matthias Dusini, Laura Feurle, Kira Kaufmann, Astrid Kury, Therese Muxeneder, Ivan Ristić, as well as a foreword by Hans-Peter Wipplinger.

Hidden Modernism. The Fascination with the Occult Around 1900
4th Sept. 2025 – 18th Jan. 2026

EXHIBITION

PRESS MATERIAL

PHOTO GALLERY

 

OPENING CELEBRATIONS

The exhibition opening – hosted by the Leopold Museum’s Director Hans-Peter Wipplinger in the presence of the Leopold Museum board members Sonja Hammerschmid, Saskia Leopold and Danielle Spera, as well as the Leopold Museum’s Managing Director Moritz Stipsicz – was attended by some 800 guests, among them Matthias Dusini and Ivan Ristić, the two curators of the exhibition, Nathan Schönberg, the great-grandson of Arnold Schönberg, Ulrike Anton (Director of the Arnold Schönberg Center), Georg Hoffmann (Director, HGM), Cosima Rainer (University of Applied Arts Vienna), artist Heimo Zobernig, Belvedere curator Verena Gamper, Michael Swatosch (Head of the Circus and Clown Museum), the catalogue authors Kira Kaufmann (Vienna University), Astrid Kury (Akademie Graz), Michaela Lindinger (Wien Museum), Therese Muxeneder (Arnold Schönberg Center) and Karl Baier, numerous private lenders, including the collector Jack Daulton and his wife Roz Ho, gallery owner Julius Hummel, the collectors Mimi and Sascha Eisenberger, Nikolaus Leopold, Axel Nemetz (At the Park Hotel, Baden), the literary scholar Walter Schübler, the art historian Patrick Werkner, as well as Gerald Zagler (Österreichischer Alpenverein). Also in attendance were the collector Waltraud Leopold, the art historian Thomas Zaunschirm, the art collectors Werner Trenker and Sonja Zsolnai-Kasztler, Albin Hahn (CFO Manner), Barbara Potisk-Eibensteiner (Post AG), Helmut and Eva Schoba (VGN), Stela Pancic (Springer & Jacoby), Jürgen Pölzl (Salon Leopold committee), Klaus Webhofer (ORF), Peter Grundmann (Hearonymus), Fritz Koreny, Katharina Murschetz (mumok), Nina Schedlmayer (morgen), Katarina Lovecky (curator at the Belvedere), the art historians Rainer Metzger and Daniela Gregori, Bernadette Reinhold (Oskar Kokoschka Center), architect Markus Spiegelfeld, Willi Dorner (choreographer), Lisa Rastl (photographer) and many others.

 

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