Art: Gleams From a Gorgeous Twilight !

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Neither as chic as Paris nor as intriguingly edgy as Budapest, the Vienna of today is a cozy and polished metropolis. But at the beginning of the 20th century, Vienna was chockablock with giants of the age: Freud and Wittgenstein, Mahler, Berg and Schoenberg, Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka, Hoffmann, Wagner and Loos -- as well as the young Adolf Hitler, a desperate artist-architect manque. Old cultural dogmas had been discredited, new doctrines not yet entrenched. Imminence was all. Artists and intellectuals all over Europe shared a sense of being on the very cusp -- between a smug century and a mad one, between well-behaved traditionalism and liberated modernism -- but nowhere was the sense more highly refined than in hothouse Vienna. Right now, on each side of the Atlantic, that singular, overwrought time and place is evoked in two remarkable museum shows.

In New York: Gemutlich Radicals

Until the last decade or so, turn-of-the-century Vienna was neglected by serious historians of architecture and art, considered somewhere between unfashionable and taboo. The architecture of Josef Hoffmann and Otto Wagner and the paintings of Gustav Klimt were camp curiosities at best -- parochial, high-strung, dead-end digressions. Today, however, a kind of Viennese revival is under way. Prominent designers and architects are producing furniture and buildings distinctly reminiscent of Hoffmann, Wagner and Adolf Loos. Every second book jacket, it seems, has a thick, angular sans serif typeface derived from the Wiener Werkstatte, the seminal crafts collaborative established in the city in 1903. Nearly the whole crop of high-design coffee services and teapots marketed since 1980 seems to have been plucked from an avant-garde Viennese workshop sometime before 1910.

Now, with the opening of "Vienna 1900: Art, Architecture and Design," a dense display of objects at New York City's Museum of Modern Art, the revised revisionism is official: the arts and crafts of early 20th century Vienna may have been idiosyncratic and lush, but they are products of the modern sensibility. MOMA's entire ground floor has been given over to the exhibit, which consists of 700 works produced between 1898 and 1918. The show, which derives from more expansive exhibits seen in Vienna and Paris over the past two years, will be on view until Oct. 21.

In the eerie, gorgeous twilight between empire and dissolution, the city's ; radical young artists and architects broke from the local academy, named themselves Secessionists and established their own countersalon in 1897. They called their journal Ver Sacrum (Sacred Spring) and practiced, as a matter of principle, a manic cross-fertilization. With Klimt, art became overtly decorative, gold-inlaid portraits masquerading as rich bijoux; with Hoffmann and his Wiener Werkstatte collaborator Koloman Moser, bowls and chairs aspired to art. It was a feverish, unresolved time, and the Viennese fin-de-siecle impulse was to savor the exquisitely confused cultural moment.