Vienna 1900: A Total Work of Art – September 2026
Study Tours
Dr Niccola Shearman
Monday 7 – Thursday 10 September 2026
£660
N.B. This course also runs earlier in the year from Monday 25 – Thursday 28 May 2026, £660.
Tour Description
The concentration of landmark buildings, historical monuments and world-renowned art collections within a relatively small urban area makes the city of Vienna a fascinating destination for an art-historical visit. For centuries it was the capital of the vast Habsburg Empire, with a grand architectural façade to match. Around 1900, the tensions arising from efforts to maintain the surface splendour against a subversive spirit of intellectual enquiry gave rise to the artistic experiment that is visible across the urban fabric and in numerous museums today.
Beginning in this era of Freud, Klimt and the architects and designers of the Austrian Secession, our spatial and historical encounters will follow successive cultural and political turns of the twentieth century. Taking in galleries of Expressionist painting and the social housing of ‘Red Vienna’, visits will extend through the dark era of Nazi power, to finish with the flowering of new hope after 1945. Everywhere observing plentiful traces of that dominant imperial past, we shall contemplate the complex legacy of shifting identities specific to this cultural crossroads at the heart of Europe.
Lecturer's Biography
Dr Niccola Shearman is an independent historian of twentieth-century art, with a focus on Germany and Austria to 1945. She has held academic positions at the University of Manchester and at the Courtauld, and also contributes to the V&A Academy. She has published various articles on German printmaking and its reception, as well as contributions to the catalogue for Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider (Tate, 2024), and is co-editor of the forthcoming volume German Art in an Expanded Field, essays in honour of Shulamith Behr (2026). In 2025, together with Dr Emily Christensen she curated the Courtauld Gallery exhibition With Graphic Intent.