The 150th anniversary of Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) is being marked with special exhibitions as part of a year-long tribute entitled “Klimt and the Birth of Modernism in Vienna”. Klimt and his contemporaries, Josef Hoffmann, Otto Wagner, Joseph Maria Olbrich, Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka, significantly influenced the period around 1900 when Vienna, capital of the Austro- Hungarian Empire, then at its most far-reaching, was also the fifth largest city in the world and the artistic and cultural capital of central Europe.

Klimt studied at the Applied Arts School (now the MAK) where we see his sketches for the Palais Stoclet along with designs and examples of the works of the Wiener Werkstätte. As a young man Klimt collaborated in the decoration of the grandest new buildings on the Ring and his ceilings at the Burgtheater and the Kunsthistorisches Museum still astonish. In Olbrich’s Secession building we can admire the reinstalled Beethoven frieze and in the Wien Museum most of his plans and sketches as well as the Portrait of Emilie Flöge. Most of Flöge’s estate is now at the Leopold Museum and is the basis of a “Klimt – a Journey through Time” exhibition covering his travels and the influence on his work of the golden mosaics of Venice and Ravenna. The Albertina is showing all 170 of its drawings and borrowing others from around the world. The Kiss is one of many important pictures on display in the Belvedere.

The Albertina is showing all 170 of its drawings and borrowing others from around the world.

We see important and influential buildings by Otto Wagner (Post Office Savings bank, stations and apartment blocks) and Adolf Loos (Michaelerplatz, American Bar, shops), and the Palais Ephrussi (as in Edmund de Waal’s “Hare with Amber Eyes”).

We stay at a 4* hotel in the very centre of Vienna and visit galleries and museum with the leading art critic Marina Vaizey. The evenings are free for opera or concerts - Die Frau ohne Schatten, Tannhäuser and Die Fledermaus are the highlights.