On loan to The Met The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Scherzo
Otto Friedrich Austrian
Friedrich painted this scene as part of a series of five canvases in which nude figures evoke different passages of music. Exhibited in its own room at the Vienna Secession in 1913, the cycle sparked appreciation from an unexpected quarter. The bodies’ "inner rhythmicality" and "harmony of line and color" were praised by the political revolutionary and exile Leon Trotsky in an art review for a radical newspaper in Kyiv (Kiev). Little-known today, Friedrich was a founder, along with Gustav Klimt, of the Secession, a pioneering artists’ society that advocated for independent creative expression and for dialogue among painting, sculpture, and design.
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