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Gustav Klimt's paintings have been sold at auction for millions in recent years. The auction prices of pieces such as Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907) certainly rival those painted by Picasso or Kandinsky. However, this appreciation is new. Art critics have usually ranked Klimt and other contemporary Viennese painters behind abstract painters; their figurative paintings were, so to speak, less modern. Nathan Timpano wants us to challenge this belief. Some of the most important examples of Viennese modernism, he suggests, include figurative paintings by Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele, and Koloman Moser. While modernist painters ventured into abstraction, those in Vienna "continued to pursue an avant-garde exploration of the human body rather than anticipating or embracing abstract compositions" (2). The artistic representation of the human body in fin-de-siècle Viennese painting was just as avant-garde as other modernist styles.
Paintings by Kokoschka, Schiele, and Moser illustrate the tension between abstraction and figuration throughout the book. These painters were particularly interested in how inner psychological states manifest themselves outwardly. The author begins the book with an analysis of theories of vision. Scholars and critics generally argue that expressionist artists gave up "the aesthetics of the outer body for the inner mind" (19). Contemporary critics, such as Wilhelm Worringer, proposed a theory of art in which observation of the natural world; for example, the overreliance on vision of impressionist painters, evolved to inner (psychological) vision. Abstraction was the result of this process, which was supported by painters like Kandinsky. By contrast,...