In the fin-de-siecle cultural effervescence, Vienna stands out by the twilight aura it gave to its artistic production. Before the explosion illustrated by the First World War, an entire society, aware of it, foreseeing it, seeking to ignore it, rushed headlong to its downfall. It has been called a merry apocalypse. A despairing lucidity, the source of a sweeping inspiration that involved musical, literary and artistic creation. In this twilight Vienna, music was revolutionised by Allan Berg, Arnold Schoenberg, Gustav Mahler; literature by Stefan Zweig, Arthur Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal, Rainer Maria Rilke, Georg Trakl; last, painting, by the masterful trio Klimt-Schiele-Kokoschka, responsible for a new way of looking at the world and the body, charging them with all the anxiety gripping the collective consciousness.This comprehensive survey of the course toward the social abyss of World War I is analysed in this book, stressing the evolution of painting through the works of its three most significant exponents. Each taking over after his predecessor, launching a more and more daring progression toward modernity.Starting from tradition with Klimt, painting resolutely became a part of the adventure of modernity with Kokoschka, this magnificent contemporary of Picasso, Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck, painters he easily matched. Constantly underlying this study of an art that links the end of the century to a blood-stained dawn we find the persistent influence of Sigmund Freud.After the discovery of psychoanalysis, we no longer look at painting as we used to.