 It is one of the highlights of our year, and I hope one that you will come and enjoy with us many times and on. Because it's a chance for us to demonstrate the breadth of research interests, of courses, of disciplines that all come together in this wonderful department of such long standing within the university. Now I should say a little bit about who I am. I'm director of graduate studies here in the department and my little kingdom is the history of design. I run a master's in that programme as well as teaching the diploma and some of the doctoral students in architectural history. So that's the little advert for the moment. If you want to talk about any of our programmes please do feel free to come and speak to me afterwards. But I should explain my subject matter for you today is really inspired by our position in the calendar of the 21st century. As you will note from the recent coin issued by the Austrian Mint in Vienna Klimt has had a couple of extraordinarily wonderful anniversaries. 2012 was 150 years since his birthday, but there's also been a wonderful renaissance of studies. Not just about Gustav Klimt as a particular temperament but the whole phenomenon of van der Siak visual culture and indeed dare I say it the world of ambivalent practice somewhere between art, sculpture, architecture and design which is at least for me the fascination of this moment around 1900. And I'm just signalling here a range of different attractions of 2013 as well. Many of you may have recognised that there is an exhibition about to burst onto our screens as it were at the National Gallery in London facing the modern portrait which is bringing together a wonderful array of Austrian painters. Klimt among them but also figures like Sheila Kokoschka. Vienna is a centre of an extraordinarily varied and vibrant artistic range of cultures around 1900 and that will be an exciting opportunity for us starting the week after next. I'm on a lighter note also including one of the rather low market versions of this phenomena. There is now a Klimt Barbie if you can imagine. And here I'm showing my design history predilections as well based on I'm sure it would cause her utter angst and disturbance to see this exquisite portrait of Adel Blockbauer in its original elegant Viennese apartment setting transfigured into this play thing for the post-modern child. But in a way that's a very opposite opener for our conversation today. Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was studying as an undergraduate at the Courtauld Klimt was nary to be seen on a slide list. This moment of fantasy at creativity was principally taught through figures like Van Gogh for Gauguin, the primacy of Paris and that centre of painting around the post-impressionist circle as Roger Fry would describe them. Really dominated the syllabi of art historical departments at that time. And one of the great excitements of my life as a teacher of art history, although one is always an eternal student as one argues here in Continuing Education has been the opportunity to integrate a much wider way of careers and types of objects into my own study of the history of art or indeed one might term it the history of visual culture. There's a whole way of different forms that visuality take around 1900 which I hope to explore with you today. And I'm just putting up here a genealogy of the scholarship around Klimt and the secessionist circle. There are wonderful primary sources, figures like Hermann Bar and Max Bruchart, both directors of the Bourg Theatre, who are advocates, apologists for the world of secessionist creativity. There is then a long pause and I think that's very telling if one thinks about the history of Central Europe, the two world wars, the aftermath of the Holocaust, this moment of Austrian avant-gardeist creativity is really put to the back of the draw of modern art history because of the historical events of the 20th century. And it is really only in the 1960s and the 1980s that there's a surge of writing about Vienna and its artistic, literary and visual cultures. The famous book there is by Karl Shorsky, a wonderful exhibition in New York organised by a curator called Kurt Varnado. And then there's been an extraordinary millenarial moment after 2000, the recent exhibition at the Welcome Institute, a couple of key publications by scholars at Birkbeck College in London. Well, it seemed an opposite centenary project for us to look at the preeminence of Klimt and Viennese secessionist culture as a subject for our conversation today. Now in my little blurb that I sent out when asked what would I like to talk about, many of you may remember I also mentioned a recent family biography by Edmund de Valle, The Hair with Amber Eyes. And I include that because I really feel the nature of art history is hugely enriched by examining who owned these objects as well as who made them. And indeed how these objects are transformed by their lives across the centuries. And I'm just showing you here in case you've not seen it, that's The Hair with Amber Eyes. This is the little netski, which is a sort of Japanese toggle, if you will, that's worn on kimonos. Edmund de Valle's family was one of the great collecting families of Europe, very much a cosmopolitan Jewish affluent grouping who migrated between the core cultural centres of Paris, Vienna, London in the darker years of the 1930s, off to Tokyo, America and beyond, as those of you will know from reading that book. And one of my other core themes today is to look as it were at the reasons why Klimt's oeuvre maybe was neglected in the 20th century because it was so intimately tied to the losses of this brief moment of Ringstrasse affluence, Ringstrasse being that core circular orbiting road at the heart of the city, this array of affluent families that were Klimt's key patrons. Many of them perish in camps during the Second World War. Many of their works are still in state collections or being fought over in the courts and in the auction houses, even as we speak. And I think this is a testament to the way in which art is not only an extraordinary document of the moment of its inception, but also a wonderful record, traumatic at times as well, of the fortunes of families as well as objects across the trajectory of history. And I'm just showing you a portrait here of Serena Pulitzer Ladera, who was one of the great patronesses of Klimt's career. But again, many of the works that she owned, which were the pinnacle of Klimt's oeuvre, are now destroyed because that was a collection that was seized by the Nazis and burned by the SS as they were fleeing a castle in 1945. So in a way, part of what I'm showing to you today is the world that was as well as the world that survives from that V&E's 1900 moment. And to me, that is where art, design, architecture are so wonderfully infused with the traces of history and experience as well as the creative imagination of individual makers. Now Klimt's career is particularly effective in trying to capture what Ringstrasse Vienna was like. Because he serves so many different masters and mistresses, like Miss Ladera, he is very much a key resource for the ministerial art projects of the 1880s and 90s. He is, in effect, an official painter in the early years of his career, creating the Kunsthistorische Museum in Vienna. That's the image you have on the far left of Archaic Greece. Equally, he has a very conflicted and indeed ultimately cancelled commission to decorate the lecture hall of the university in Vienna. That's what you see photographed there in its current sort of reimagined state. But also this wonderful career decorating, imagining the spaces of elegant, fantasy-like V&E's society. Everything from the secession building itself right the way through to the private dwelling of the Sion of the Belgian soda factory manufacturer who happens to live in Brussels but spends his delay 20 years in Vienna and commissions perhaps one of the most love-ish Wienerwerkstetter interiors to survive until this day. So we're really looking at what I would call decoration. Now, that's a word that has become regarded with a certain degree of contempt and suspicion. Dare I say it, the great Mr. Pevsner has a certain role to play there. The celebration of modernist functionalism or the great historical periods of the past left this moment of our nouveau, of ornament, of decoration in his words as a blind alley which we happily now neglect. Now, I hope to suggest to you that is not the best way forward. This is a period of creativity which well merits our attention and interest. Before I walk through a couple of glimpse sort of main works in this decoration mode that I hope to present you with, it might be useful for us to take a moment or two to think about the milieu of Vienna in this time. Klimt, like so many creative temperaments of his generation, is hugely influenced not just by painters or designers or architects but by the world of music, of poetry, the contemporary debates about nationality and politics. No creative temperament lives out with its age and I think it's worth just pausing a moment to think about what was Vienna like around 1900. And I've just lifted here a little fragment out of a very famous essay of one of the founders of the disciplines of sociology, Georg Simmel, describing metropolitan modern life and its effect on the mentality of modern humanity. And I won't read it out to you there, you can see it on the screen, but the core debate being this constant tension and mutual interest between the individual and collective society that one is both fascinated by the world. Oh, that's lovely. Thank you for bringing the line, Stan. I had asked for that, so that's great. Thank you, John. That you have a real sense here of one desperately wants around 1900 to experience these fantastic cultural centres like Paris, New York, Chicago, London, Vienna, Berlin. But one does so at a certain cost. I call it the sort of London underground rush hour effect. It's wonderful to have all of this on one's doorstep, the plays, the cafes, the theatres, but there is also a certain disintegration of the self that is incurred by that constant encounter with other personalities, other experiences. And I think this is core to the way in which decoration has a revival. And I've just illustrated alongside that this extraordinary poster for the first Secessionist exhibition designed by Gustav Klimt. I think it is a wonderful example of him trying to provide you a momentary space of open imagination. He's given you the guardian figure of Athena, goddess of intellect and war, as well as culture. He shows you Theseus wrestling with the Minotaur. I'm showing you the uncensored version. The Viennese police censor decided that you had to put a very strategic tree right about here, which all later versions, this is the original production of it, carefully avoid that very declarative presentation of sexuality. But the core of the poster is absence or possibility, is it not? And that is surely one of the key aspects of Secessionist creativity. Secession is a term that derives from an ancient Roman practice, the Secessio Plavis, a set of young Romans also horrified by the decadence of their indulgent fathers and politicians, that they vacate the city, go to a local sacred spring with the city walls to found a new fresh, young sacred spring, a new society. They secede from Rome. So a lot of what Secession is offering you is a clearing out of space of mentality in order to imagine modernity, to imagine a new 20th century self. And I think that poster captures this extraordinarily well. Now, this Secessionist approach is indebted to a whole range of other temperaments and ideas of the period. I'm just showing you here the famous analogy, which is always to Richard Faldner's Gesamtkunstwerk, one of those million-dollar German words, literally usually translated as the total work of art. I think this idea of the immersion of the self in a synesthetic, totalizing cultural experience has a huge impact on the young Klimt and many of the composers like Mahler and the writers like Hugo von Hoffmann style that we'll look at in a moment. This idea that creative expression should completely absorb and surround you. And this is why in Bayreuth, Wagner creates the first orchestra pit. So you're unaware of where the music comes up from. He drops the lights as we just did so that you're utterly immersed in the visual experience, not looking at the lady opening her fan and the gentleman lighting his cigarette. It is that immersion of the mind, the body, the whole self in the cultural experience. Now, 20th century teaches us this has very dark undertones when it is used in the offices of political persuasion. But at this moment, I think it is regarded as an opportunity for creative expression. Now, I think it's worth also pausing to reflect on how complicated it was in Austro-Hungarian in 1900. If one sat the state exams, you could as a bureaucrat technically be responsible for 39 languages. It is an impossible social project, not only in terms of all of these different cultural traditions, but also in the sort of key polarization between Teutonic and Slavic culture, which is a problem that reappears in military guise again and again in the century that follows. And I think part of the great success of secessionism, not just amongst private patrons, but through very active state support in the so-called Ministry of Bureaucrats of the 1890s, was that ministers like Willem von Hartl or Ernst von Kerber recognized that if you used ornamental or visual traditions that are aligned either to Teuton or to Slav, buying art for the state ends up being a factional divisive process. Secessionism is so out there, it doesn't seem to belong absolutely to either of those rival factions and thereby creates a space and opportunity for a new visual vocabulary for Austro-Hungarian identity. And this is why, look at the way in which the Budapest Postal Savings Bank is ornamented. It's like an extraordinary multi-coloured lacework palette. I'll come to show you the Austrian post office in a moment, and you'll see what I mean about this Slavic Teutonic tension. But I think this political underpinning and sponsorship is worth reiterating. Clint is also part of Jung Veen, this world of young men and women who are desperate to release themselves from the proprieties, the constraint, the politeness of Ringstrasse society. It is reminiscent of our own Bloomsbury set in the Edwardian period, that desperation to say outrageous things and wear outrageous clothes. And I think a lot of this new vocabulary of secessionist painting, literature and music decides to opt for what one might call a Dionysian vocabulary of fall. And by that, I mean that we're not going back to the sober propriety of the classical tradition, which is the hallmark of many of the great building projects of the earlier 19th and 18th centuries, but instead going back to archaic Greece. It is not Apollo looking pretty and balanced. It is the world of Dionysus, Silenius, all of these wonderful objects that you see on the far left of the screen, the metope of Medusa that inspires the aegis that Palacithinae wears in Clint's arresting image. I don't know if you can make out that the background of this work absolutely cites the figures from one of these Attic vase paintings that Clint studies in the historical collection in Vienna. And indeed this extraordinary visage, very much more fashion plate of the 1890s, I would argue, rather than grey-eyed goddess of the ancient world. I'm suggesting that Emily Flurga, one of the few women whom Clint befriended rather than bedded, let's be honest, she is absolutely his intellectual peer and muse. And I think we've become so involved with Clint's relationship with the sexuality of femininity. We perhaps overlook the degree to which many of his images also capture the power, the creativity, the intellectual presence of these femme fatales of the period as well. And I think that aspect of archaic Greece being a sort of matriarchal context is perhaps worth also adding to the mix. Now a lot of this is very exciting, but it has repercussions. And I think that wonderful word that my father used to use whenever he had a touch of flu, I'm a bit neuralgic, is I think very much what's involved with this fundosiectomology of neurasthenia. We're back to symbols, it's all very fun being in a city, but it makes us tired, it makes us nervous. It's worth remembering that Clint is also sitting across the cafe table with key figures like these authors in Jung Wien or Sigmund Freud and the foundation of the discipline of psychoanalysis. The works of Nietzsche are on those tables as well, recuperating the world of ancient Greek tragedy in all of its dramatic, cathartic challenge. And I think that's where, if you read a poem like Idle on an Ancient Vars painting, compare that to the graceful, pleasant poetry of Keats about the Grecian urn. He is arrested by those powerful bodies. But by contrast, Hugo von Hoffmann style imagines the daughter of an Ancient Vars painter marrying a blacksmith, being a bit fed up with him, he's a bit of a brute. She wanders into her father's studio, picks up one of his vases, and through a hypnotic moment enters into a loving relationship with the centaur, painted thereupon. The poem ends with her brutish husband, the blacksmith, arriving into the Vars painting studio, seeing his wife and the centaur getting up to no good. He also enters the Vars and kills them both. So I think there is a sense of free love's all very fine and large, but it's problematic if one has been raised within a context of constraint. And I think it is that mixture of pleasure and anxiety, which surely is at the heart of Klimt's creative project. Now, just before I walk you through the sort of three key decoration commissions I wanted to show to you, I just want to walk you round the Ringstrasse to give you a sense of this extraordinarily eclectic historicism, which is the signature of architecture and much painterly practice of this period, a contemporary photograph of the Ringstrasse, which shows you the Rathaus here, this is the Parliament building, that's the vote of Kirscher. This shows you this extraordinary new world of public parks and boulevards, a place to promenade, which is given by the Emperor Franz Josef, when his army does rather poorly in the 1860s. They lose a couple of battles to the Piedmontese and some other Italians, and he gives the old arsenal spaces over to the city to make it a cultural capital. And again, Athena, this goddess of culture being taken as the core aegis, not the image of the Emperor, interestingly. Again, look at all of these different cacophony of styles, a medieval Gothic being deployed for the city hall in order to capture that moment when municipal authority comes to the fore, the Kunstler House, which is effectively the Viennese Academy of the period, in that classical Renaissance revival style. This is the main grand staircase of the state theater, the Borgtheater, for which Klimt creates a whole series of ceilings. You saw the Teomina one on the last slide. But alongside all of this wonderful fascination with historical styles, you also have this powerful new force for functionalism and modern simplicity. This is the Viennese Postal Savings Bank. Think about the one we just saw in Budapest, and you can see why people were nervous about cultural exchange in Austria-Hungary. It's all about efficiency, simplicity. Otto Wagner is often put forward as the sort of founding father of functionalist thought in design and architecture. He designs Viaducts as well as railway stations. This is the one on Karlsplatz, where you can now get a very nice coffee Michelangrum. It was originally a used metro station. Again, furniture for a public space where you have metal embellishments that are to protect the bent wood shape of the chair, but very modest materials out fully simplified to operate more effectively. So, to get to the meat of our conversation, secessionism and Klimt's role within it. Now, Klimt is, I think, in many ways the sort of father figure for the group. But I cannot stress enough that there are a whole array of wonderful creative temperaments involved when that original group gets fed up with the academy, stand up in the vote after a number of their works have been refused from the annual exhibition and found this wonderful society in 1897-8. This is the journal that they start to publish. Sacred Spring, Versacrum, hence the secessionist point I made earlier. And this is the installation of one of their first exhibitions. Notice how much design figures in that show. They're eager to encourage a relationship between the whole interior as well as a celebration of painting. They have such a big success after their first exhibition in 97, which was held in a set of glass houses at the Botanical Gardens. They make 57,000 kroner from entrance fees. So that's enough money to build them the famous secession building. And thereafter, that's a sight of at least four or five exhibitions every year up until the First World War. Another extraordinary testament to secessionist ideals, very much inspired by those archaic Greek temples such as Sugesta, no windows on the front of the edifice, very simplified planar spaces. Olbrecht, the architects, describes it as the creation of inner realm, the inner psychological space of creativity. As you'll see at the bottom there, many of the critics were not quite so kind. Describing it as a temple for bullfrogs, a crematorium, a mosque, and a Syrian lavatory, need one go on. It was quite a confrontational project with this orb of golden leaves atop a quite ominous gateway. You have figures of Medusa-like heads for painting, sculpture and architecture, this wonderful aphorism coined by the critic Ludovic Hvesi to the age its art to art its freedom. So again, very much this assertion of outsider secessionist status. And what goes on inside the building is just as robust in its variety and confrontation. I'm just showing you a couple of the wonderful posters for the exhibitions that ranged everything from design to Japanese printmaking to landscape to portraiture. This is one of the original installations. You can see this is a very different approach to those floor-to-ceiling hangs that were more typical of the 19th century. The spaciousness, the elegance of it, it's as if you're in a garden setting to observe the world of creative art. Perhaps most importantly for the education of a young generation of artists and an art public was the arrival of a whole range of artwork from beyond Vienna. And this is a core mission of the secessionist group. They are desperate for Viennese society to start looking outwards, towards the imperial court. So you've got Van Gogh, Sekantini, Knopf, Puvi de Chauvin, Walter Crane, all of the great and the good across Europe and the New World, being both exhibited in Vienna, but even possible to observe through the journal Versacrem with its very elegant, clear illustrations, even if you are living in Romania or the far-flung corners of Czech lands. So let me now bring us round, having set this milieu of secessionism, placed Klimt within his political and artistic milieu, to try and talk about these sort of three core decorative projects which in varying ways survive or vanish in the 20th and 21st centuries. The most notorious, often referred to as the Klimt Affair, was Willem von Hartl's commission for Klimt to participate with his colleague, Franz Mach, in the decoration of the main lecture hall for the faculties of philosophy, medicine and law. Now, this is what it would have looked like. I think you're getting the point that it never happens in the ultimate form. And this is a preliminary sketch to give you a sense of tonality. I regret I'm having to show you black-and-white photographs that were taken before the works were destroyed in the fire set by the SS. Now, the first ceiling of philosophy is where it all starts to go horribly wrong. If you can imagine what the philosophy syllabus was like in Vienna in the 1890s, it is very much in the positivist vein of philosophical thinking, comity and belief in the knowability of the world. We have the intellect, the rationality to order and control our world by philosophical experiment and logic. I don't think that's what inspired Klimt. Do you? We're much more in that nebulous, anxious, fascinating world of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, a figure of a Sphinx, Urda from Wagner's Ring Cycle at the base there. But the thing that leads 87 members of the faculty to sign a petition demanding that this work never be installed is this palpably of troubled souls on the far left-hand side. Philosophy seems to be much more a source of torment rather than resolution and perhaps more authentically than one perhaps argues, but needless to say, it didn't go well. Willem von Hartl stands by Klimt, though. Another work is produced. This one is to represent medicine. Klimt doesn't hold his touches. Medicine here is not a black-coated man demonstrating the start of vaccination and the triumph of science over illness and mortality. No, it is the goddess Hygiea who preffers you a cup which may be poison, which may be help, but we're entirely unsure. I think you can imagine their anxiety with a set of 18-year-old male undergraduates, including naked figures of pregnant women, others in ecstasy, as well as a whole range of people for whom medicine appears to have done nothing at all to help them. Klimt's got the measure. These are never going to be installed. So for the final work for law, he doesn't go with the figure of justice. Instead, he represents the prisoner in the dock surrounded by the furies of rather cute-looking octopus, but he's meant to be a figure of torment and fear. And the judges are shown as tiny miniature figures, so aloof and unconcerned with the fate of humanity that I think it is the hardest slap that he dare give. Now, this is where Serena Ladera comes into play. She purchases the ceilings along with her husband's support. This allows Klimt to give the money back to the city of Vienna and they are saved briefly for that private collection. Now, that leads Klimt, I think, to reassess his whole relationship to the Ringstrasse milieu. It's been wonderful. He's had positive relationship with private portrait commissions, with decorations for theaters and museums. But by 1902, after all of this battle and the enulling of that mission, the last two key decorative projects before the First World War are very much more for his inner circle. The first being the decorations for the Beethoven Exhibition of 1902, an original photograph of the installation inside the secession building. Again, you see that archaic Greek temple inspiration with the wooden lintels and the rough harling on the walls, a poster for the exhibition by Alfred Roller. But this is the work that even now perhaps best captures the extraordinary integration of art, of decoration, of design and architectural practices in the work of Klimt. Just for this last centenary year, there was an installation art piece set within the Klimt room, which allowed you to walk at eye level, which was a revelation. Did any of you go to see this? Oh, a missed chance. Did any of you go to Liverpool in 2008? So you will have had that experience then where you're at eye level, because naturally these are freezes at a very high level in the room, so they appear to be quite flat. But if you stand eye to eye with the great heroic figures of the night, or perhaps best yet, the typhoon, who looks like a stuffed animal I had as a child, but he's meant again to be terrifying and disturbing. These eyes that you see are made out of huge mother of pearl discs. Many of the tendril-like gilded shapes are made out of gilded string and semi-precious stones. And there's a lot of debate about whether the Glasgow artist, Donald, pioneers this process, or Klimt does. I'm more interested in the fact that they're both collaborating, conversing about this at the same time. But it is another one of these voyages of the self into the inner world of the mind of inspiration. If in the first panel a thinly disguised portrait of the composer Gustav Mahler as a heroic knight, and bear in mind that all the time one was walking through the Beethoven exhibition, there was a chamber music setting of Beethoven's ninth by Gustav Mahler paying in the background, as well as perfumed incense walking through the air. Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk. Absolutely. This heroic knight I think is ill-equipped in his modest body. Could he lift that broad sword? I'm not sure. Certainly seems unlikely to get past the typhoon or indeed these terrifying seductive figures who one seems to be drawn to with their alluring bodies, but perhaps less so in the repercussions of free love in an age of syphilis and anxiety. This panel extends into one called nagging care. So again that world of neurasthenia and the inner self and then culminates by way of poetry to that wonderful last moment of the ninth symphony based on the Schiller poem be embraced all ye millions originally meant as a rallying cry for the brotherhood of German youth, but here imagined as the ultimate integration of the amorous couple. And again I've done a slightly off angle view there so you can see that three-dimensional Gesso surface which is extraordinary. This is just the anti-chamber. It's meant to lead you into this space with this extraordinary multimedia sculpture by the German artist Max Klinger representing the great heroic romantic figure Beethoven. Seated, surrounded by an ominous eagle the back of his throne has figures of femme fatale and crucifixions. This is the romantic temperament which speaks to the fantasy generation around Klimt and others. So having had this last sort of wonderful public statement Klimt does participate in the 1908 Kundschau exhibition with Krakowska and the next generation of expressionists. But I think many people would argue that 1902 is his last big public statement around that wonderful Beethoven show. I just want to end with, to my mind, one of the most exquisite interiors that he created for a private residence. Now this is after the moment of 1903 after the secessionist painters all get up and walk out in the 1890s from the academy. From that group another set get up and walk out from the secessionist group because they're fed up with the over-emphasis on impressionist landscape painting as the core vocabulary. They want to have applied art, printmaking all these other media that had been included in that first show. And funded by this man in the centre Fritz Wendorfer very much supported and directed by the figures of the Czech designer Joseph Hofmann and the wonderful Viennese artist Kolman Mosa. A whole design studio comes into being very much modelled on Arts and Crafts examples in this country. It's all about handicraft. It's beautiful objects that make you feel the handy work of the maker, relish their joy in making. And I'm just showing you here a array of the showrooms and exhibitions that the Wienerwerkstetter stores put on in the 1900s. They survive up until the 1930s but their main heyday is before the First World War. Now the Wienerwerkstetter group Klimt being part of that are commissioned by this scion of a great Belgian industrial family the Stocklays. Now Adolf had I think planned the rest of his life in Viennese cafes drinking his life away in pleasure but unfortunately his father died rather young so he had to come back to Brussels to run the family firm. The way he copes with this obligatory responsibility is to make his own Viennese palace in the Tevuren district just outside the heart of Brussels. The wonderful Palais Stocklays which as I last checked was on the market for about a million euro if you're on the radar for such things do buy it, make it open for the public we'd all love to see inside it's been closed for generations but I think you get a sense no one has ever been able to document how much money was spent on this he had a limitless budget for the Wienerwerkstetter group to use the finest marbles the most up-to-date furnishings built from the very ground up this silver teapot cost 935 kroner which is about 800 times the weekly wage of a craftsman in this period so incredibly lavish environment and for that Klimt creates this extraordinary set of mosaics for the dining room and I think this is where we have the public and the private that mixture of the individual, the collective the archaic and the modern that we've been exploring throughout our conversation today all reverberating against each other surely the choice of mosaic is indebted to his visit to Ravenna and the extraordinary Theodore mosaics at San Vitale but it also is that pushing forward of his vocabulary into genuinely abstract pattern making this is notionally a figure of a knight but we've gone a long way as pseudonym figure in the other image and that's just to give you a flavour of the installation in that dining room itself again that light motif of the erotic kiss as the embodiment of life, of creativity the tree of life in the centre creating this wondrous shimmering screen and then this terrifying and alluring figure of the femme fatale on perhaps in danger, perhaps in longing and I think that sense of expectation of exquisite execution this is the sort of culmination of Klimt's voyage so just to end with some of the late works those wonderful landscapes on the Atticee Lake there is now a museum of those much of the landscape collections from the main Viennese museums are now on the lake it is wonderful to see them juxtaposed with the lake itself when he spent his summers the famous kiss which now adorns to my utter horror anniversary cards I really really hope none of you send this to your wife or husband it is a desperately troubling image of amorous desire that clutching holding embrace is I think absolutely capturing this climate of adventure, anxiety exquisite beauty that was the van der Siak the Vienna woods that you see here are only a handful of miles away from Buchenwald so just at the moment at which we are having this crescendo of cosmopolitanism of lavish beauty of an embracing of modernity and a recuperation of archaic identity always there is a ghost at the feast but I hope that you've enjoyed thinking about Klimt and Vienna and do enjoy the National Gallery show thank you ever so much