Art historian Alessandra Comini focuses on the Vienna Fantastic Movement in fin de siecle Vienna (at the end of the nineteenth century.) She not only introduces us to the artists of this movement and their work, but to the artistic, social, and historical context of the time. As University of Alberta music professor Alexander Carpenter observed in an essay for Aeon Magazine, these years in Vienna are commonly celebrated as a period of explosive artistic, literary, intellectual and especially musical modernization in which resolutely iconoclastic geniuses such as Schoenberg, Sigmund Freud, Gustav Klimt and Alfred Schnitzler broke with the past in order to lay the groundwork for the future. Comini points to important influence of the striking dualities characterizing fin de siecle Viennese culture: reality and illusion; death and sexuality; and the eternal world and the inner self. Appropriately, Vienna was known as the City of Dreams.

This book will entrance fans of the dreamy, psychologically fascinating art that emerged from this period. Forty color plates and forty-five black and white plates show us the work of Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka, Brauer, and Hundertwasser, inter alia. ( )