The exhibition will include more than 100 works gathered together for Vienna for the first time in cooperation with Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique. The show centres around the works of the most famous exponent of Belgian Symbolism: Fernand Khnopff. Works by Odilon Redon, Felicién Rops, Constantin Meunier, William Degouve de Nuncques and Jean Delville supplement the selection to make up a comprehensive presentation of this hitherto underestimated and insufficiently appraised art movement – the exhibition is an act of (re-)discovery on the part of the BA-CA Kunstforum. Symbolism is in its concepts and statements essential for our understanding of modern art. The response to Belgian Symbolism was immediate throughout the whole western art scene: we only have to think of Odilon Redon, Paul Gauguin, Gustave Moreau, Koloman Moser, Gustav Klimt, Leon Bakst, William Blake and Franz von Stuck. In its interweaving of dream and reality it became the source of inspiration for a great number of groundbreaking innovations in early twentieth century art.

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