The fears and anxieties of Vienna in the final years before the outbreak of the Great War found expression in the writing of Freud, the music of Gustav Mahler and the haunting paintings of Klimt, Kokoschka and Schiele. Shimmering portraits flecked with gold; hypnotic landscapes of vibrant brushstrokes; erotic dreams of decadence and death reveal a society in search for salvation at a time when mankind had lost faith in its future. The lecture traces the course of this brief, often dark but always dazzlingly inventive period of art.