The National Gallery has set out a show in an exhibition to unveil the work of landmark masters of the era as Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele or Oskar Kokoschka. Moreover, canvassing by a host of lesser-known contemporaries was enlightening.

The exhibition, `Facing the Modern: The Portrait in Vienna 1900', is a fractured and fragmented portrait of the city itself. It is a city that had complicated social mores and culture and they still are.

The rates of suicide were high, especially among the city's Jewish community. A century ago, Vienna was a police state, socially conservative, multicultural yet driven by anti-semitism, misogynistic and paternalistic.

A plaster death mask of Beethoven opens the exhibition. He died in Vienna in 1827. Schiele and Klim are the stars of the show without any doubt. Klimt began as an extremely proficient and conventional portraitist. His works has basic sense on enquiry.

The ending of the show comes with Klimt's 1917-18 portrait of Amalie Zuckerkandl and not with the death masks or the portrait of Emperor Franz Joseph. Klimt, unfortunately, could not finish the painting before his death, but it still looks complete without his usual decorative excess. The painting's symmetry is incredible and makes everyone feel how Zuckerkandl looks directly at the viewer.