At the turn of the 20th century, art found its motifs in the otherworldly Gothic

Aren't we all a little bit "Gothic"? Vincent van Gogh was. He proved it in 1886. He painted "Head of a Skeleton with a Burning Cigarette." Today, the smoking skeleton would be printed on the packaging of tobacco products as a warning.

At the time, it was a macabre joke. A joke about an old theme in art. About death. It loses its sting when it's mocked. The symbolist Max Klinger knew this too. For his 1897 etching "On the Rails," he placed a skeleton on the railway tracks. Can death be killed? Can death commit suicide?

The Albertina Museum in Vienna has put on a grand and fascinating exhibition of the spirit of the times with its "Gothic Modern" exhibition. The centuries join hands here, from the Middle Ages to the modern era. Avoiding the term Gothic for this ancient art is a clever move. It's not about a style, it's about a mood.

What was once Christian apocalypse resurfaced at the turn of the 20th century. It was a sign of secular uncertainty. Machines had replaced God. Their deification, in the name of progress, diminished humanity. Through psychoanalysis, humanity was forced to submit to yet another humiliation. They were no longer masters in their own house. Their self was merely a puzzle of coincidences.

All of this is contained in "Gothic Modern," an exhibition that one enters through darkened first rooms and becomes increasingly brighter the further one proceeds. It ranges from the shadowy questionable nature of human existence as such to the Enlightenment. That this appears in the final room in the sacred light of Edvard Munch's "The Sun" is certainly in keeping with the program.

The feeling of emotion familiar to Gothic art has by no means disappeared in the modern era. Munch imagined a setting for the presentation of his "Frieze of Life" that would be designed "in a Gothic-like style." The Norwegian painter could even have imagined the famous "Scream" on a stained-glass window, framed by a pointed arch.

There's this recourse from the present to the past. Also in the last room of the exhibition is Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's painting "Rhine Bridge in Cologne" from 1914. In perspective, the bridge's steel struts converge on Cologne Cathedral. A modern cathedral of technology in front of the famous building, which was begun in 1248 and only completed in 1880.

The Albertina has brilliantly succeeded in staging a theater of transitions. One finds oneself before dramatic 16th-century body representations, the religious ecstasies of Matthias Grünewald, or the human studies of Albrecht Dürer. And suddenly one finds oneself with sketches by Alberto Giacometti or portraits by Paula Modersohn-Becker. Ernst Barlach's 1917 figure "The Doubter" has a counterpart in the sculpture of an anonymous master who probably worked as early as the 12th century.

This is not about mere similarities, but rather about the fact that modernism could rediscover itself in Gothic art as a radical art form. In an era that was free from academicism and still reflected on humanity in the face of the divine. If modernism dissected the individual, then Gothic art reflects on humanity. The rich pictorial program of "Melancholy" by Lucas Cranach the Elder, one of the showpieces of the 200-piece exhibition, describes a fundamental existential mood and not yet a private mood of discord, not a therapeutic isolated case.

"Gothic Modern" vividly demonstrates how the self of the modern artist inscribes itself into the almost panoramic despair of a bygone era. In doing so, it transforms itself into a subjective symbol of insecurity and a double contemporary. In 1913, Otto Dix painted a self-portrait that seems to bear a direct resemblance to the famous Augsburg master's "Portrait of a Young Man with a Red Cap." In 1872, Arnold Böcklin created a "Self-portrait with a Fiddle-Playing Death," which takes up the vanitas motif and transcends the concept of Gothic in a pop-cultural sense.

At the turn of the century, the art magazine "Pan" was the inspirational medium for the cultural elite. Relevant articles in the magazine led to pilgrimages to Colmar to see Matthias Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece. The drastic and not exactly non-violent depictions of Hans Holbein the Younger were also impressive at the time.

His famous, life-size "Corpse of Christ in the Grave," dated 1521/1522, set a precedent among modern artists. Arnold Böcklin, Käthe Kollwitz, and Franz von Stuck took up the subject, as did the Finnish painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela, who can be discovered in the exhibition alongside a whole host of artists from Northern Europe. In Gallen-Kallela's case, however, the dead Christ is not actually Christ. It is Lemminkäinen, a hero from the Finnish national epic Kalevala, mourned by his mother.

The "Gothic Modern" exhibition has very cleverly focused on individual themes. The search for the primal plays a role here: nature, death, pain, and the sensual. Where Lucas Cranach depicts Adam and Eve, even at the Fall, in intimate beauty and rich colors in Paradise, Max Beckmann's work depicts the giants of fear. His 1917 biblical couple, stalked by a wolf, represents the final stage of sensuality's decline.

What stems from the Christian iconography of the Gothic period becomes, in Beckmann's work, a reservoir of a dark unconscious. Hardly anyone else has so thoroughly adapted this distant era. Beckmann's work features timeless, yet avant-garde scenes of hell and witchcraft. As an inverse Dürer, he leads the field of artists who bring the tortured body into the picture. The whole is embedded in a thematization of industrial and social alienation processes.

The escalating stages of the physical are evident throughout the entire exhibition, and of course, Egon Schiele cannot be missed in Vienna. Early on, it was claimed that he was actually a Gothic artist, because the contorted poses of his bodies, for example, are reminiscent of the martyr depictions of the old master Hans Baldung Grien. The Albertina is showing works by Grien, including "Death Pursuing a Girl" and "Large St. Sebastian," which are juxtaposed with Schiele's "Self-Portrait" of 1914 and a "Male Nude" (1912).

The sickbed of the early 20th century is surrounded by nightmares. One wanders through gloomy landscapes, such as those painted primarily by Northern Europeans. Edvard Munch's "The Forest," Joseph Alanen's "Sickness and Death," and Hugo Simberg's "Fear in the Woods" depict both internal and external geographies simultaneously. States of derangement and fear. As if the Gothic, whose cathedrals strive toward the light, were buried in a dark basement.

That Edvard Munch is the master of these phenomena is clearly evident in the exhibition curated by Albertina director Ralph Gleis over seven years of work. For Munch, even love is a deception. The painting, depicting a couple in a garden, is uncomfortably titled "Eye to Eye." What could be a kissing pair of lovers is titled "Vampire."

Have modernists, in their search for new forms of expression, taken vampish possession of Gothic art? The Albertina doesn't intend to launch any grand theories with its exhibition. It's a showcase of subtle hints.

One can enter a cultural space of experience that has survived beyond technological and social changes, and which perhaps truly is described by the word "Gothic." This would describe a sense of unease in the world that is updated by external conditions, by wars or catastrophes, but never completely lost. Are we currently in the process of becoming Gothic again? This, too, can be considered at Vienna's Albertina.

"Gothic Modern." Albertina Vienna. Until January 11, 2026. Catalogue €32.90.