Para-Modernism

Freedom! Shaking off the constraints of bourgeois life, capitalism and industrial society. This was the dream of a great many young people around 1900 – and they set about making it come true. Some of them embarked on a new life in reform colonies far away from urban areas. The desire for a peaceful existence in harmony with nature was at the heart of these ambitions, as were new ideas about health, physical culture and spirituality – a new attitude to life that went on to find expression in a new aesthetic.

In art and design, Art Nouveau and Expressionism introduced new creative ideas. The reform movement also found expression in everyday life: vegetarianism, the rejection of bourgeois marriage and traditional gender roles, nudism, alternative forms of education and, last but by no means least, the media, which were essential to the propagation of these new ideas. Where did these new paths lead and which ideas do we still recognise in today’s zeitgeist? The exhibition sheds light on the ideals of the early life reform movements, but also examines individual reformers whose esoteric world view and idealisation of the ‘healthy’ body led them to embrace racist and nationalist ideologies. The exhibition is the first to look not only at the developments in Europe but also at the links to American counter-culture and the flower power movement.

For the exhibition, we were able to borrow a major work by Gustav Klimt. With his Nuda Veritas (1899), Klimt rigorously ignored the established norms of art. The combination of image and text, the symbolic representation and the embedding of the motifs in an ornamental design – all of this was a rejection of the prevailing academicism. The exhibition looks at the close connection between the art of Art Nouveau and the ideas of the life reform movement.