Facing the Modern: The Portrait in Vienna 1900 was an exhibition at the National Gallery, London, running from 9 October 2013 through to 12 January 2014.
 The exhibition was curated by Gemma Blackshaw and sponsored by Credit Suisse.
 The exhibition catalogue was entitled Facing the Modern: The Portrait in Vienna 1900. It is edited by Gemma Blackshaw and has an introduction by Edmund de Waal. Contributors are:
 Edmund de Waal is the author of The Hare with Amber Eyes, which tells the story of his family, the wealthy Jewish Ephrussi family, who settled in Vienna towards the end of the 19th century. One of the first things they did to establish themselves was to commission portraits. The exhibition catalogue explores the way in which portraiture in Vienna was intertwined with patronage, politics and the creation of taste. Included in the exhibition (exhibit no. 73) is an Ephrussi family photograph album, dating from about 1904, depicting members of the family in tableaux vivants.
 Gustav Klimt's Auditorium in the Old Burgtheater contains one hundred and thirty-one minutely realised portraits of the upper echelons of Viennese society at the time, and as such has been characterised as a portrait of the late 19th century. But it also an image of the emerging middle classes that most defined that century. The catalogue takes as its subject this new class, the Neu-Wiener (New Viennese), and retells the story of the modern portrait as its story.
 The Galerie Miethke was one of Vienna's most progressive galleries. Yet in 1905 it devoted an exhibition to portraits of the early nineteenth century, the Alt-Wiener (Old Viennese), reflecting the anxieties of the age in seeking comfort from the past. Neu-Wiener (New Viennese) portraits such as Anton Romako's Portrait of Isabella Reisser reflect a new psychologism.
 Tag Gronberg surveys the portrayal of family values over an extended 19th century ranging from the early 1800s to the First World War. In Fin-de-siècle Vienna it was still possible to see nostalgic portrayals of family life in the Biedermeier tradition of the first half of the century. But in the age of Freud such depictions of harmonious domesticity no longer went unchallenged and by 1918 portraits such as Egon Schiele's The Family posed stark challenges to the viewer.
 Hans Makart was the dominant portraitist in the Ringstrasse period (1857–1914). His portraits were primarily of young women from the upper middle classes and the lower ranks of the nobility, an upwardly mobile group of patrons anxious to legitimise their status in a rigidly hierarchical and traditional monarchical system. By Gustav Klimt's time, ideals of beauty had changed. Klimt incorporated design principles in his portraits that he had developed in his other works. In his later work the application of color increased dramatically, in response to the advent of Fauvism.
 Gustav Klimt completed just one self-portrait during his 40-year career, declaring himself uninterested in himself as a subject for a painting. Egon Schiele on the other hand portrayed himself frequently, using his body as a medium of expression, approaching it as just another material to be manipulated. Schönberg was an untrained artist, "in many ways the archetypal artist-genius" in the Romantic tradition of the anxious and alienated artist, as represented in self-portraits by Friedrich von Amerling, Franz Eybl, and the young Rudolf von Alt.
 Julie M. Johnson discusses the lives and work of Broncia Koller-Pinell, Elena Luksch-Makowsky, and Teresa Ries. Woman artists in Fin-de-siècle Vienna, many of whom were Jewish, laboured under misogyny and restrictions, but nevertheless were able to pursue careers as public artists, to sustain studios, and to mount spectacular exhibitions.
 Elana Shapira examines the portraiture of Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Richard Gerstl, and Arnold Schönberg.  In portraying their Jewish sitters, Klimt and Kokoschka sought to create a shared cultural platform between Jews and Christians while Gerstl and Schönberg sought to expose the problems behind that artistic aim.
 Fin-de-siècle Vienna's fascination with death and dying may have been the result of a deep-rooted cultural pessimism, but it had positive affirmation as well in its tradition of a schöne Leiche, or  beautiful corpse. When Gustav Klimt was called upon to paint a deathbed portrait of Ria Munk, a suicide scandalously involved with the novelist Hanns Heinz Ewers, he first portrayed her as a sleeping beauty. Her mother Aranka rejected this, as well as a subsequent version portraying her as a bare-breasted exotic dancer, leading Klimt to his celebrated, unfinished, Posthumous Portrait of Ria Munk III. The painting was seized by the Nazis and eventually restituted to the heirs of Aranka Munk in 2009, fetching £18,801,250 at auction in 2010.
 Works from the following artist are exhibited:
 The following works are exhibited:
 Praise was generally somewhat muted. Reviewers welcomed the opportunity to view paintings by Schiele and Klimt, rarely seen in the UK, but expressed dismay at the way the exhibition was hung, that the order of works was not chronological, and over the paucity of information about the works and their sitters. Richard Dorment for The Daily Telegraph thought the show more of an illustrated lecture than an exhibition, while Jackie Wullschlager of The Financial Times called it a "heartbreaking missed opportunity". Adrian Searle of The Guardian thought the exhibition both "dizzying and depressing" but not an exhibition about great portraiture, as much about Vienna itself as its portraitists and sitters. His colleague Laura Cumming complained the show was frustratingly chaotic and observed it was most alive when depicting death. Brian Sewell of The Evening Standard shared concerns over the way the exhibition was organised, nevertheless welcomed the opportunity to view some lesser known names, although trenchant in his dismissal of Arnold Schönberg's work: "The most unwise of these excursions is the exaltation as artist-genius, even comparing him with Van Gogh, of the composer Arnold Schönberg, 26 and penniless in 1900, his crass amateur paintings "untainted" by training, deliberately naive – a folly equalled only by our acceptance, a century later, of Paul McCartney as a painter".
 Rachel Campbell-Johnston for The Times (paywall), in a positive review, called the exhibition a complicated, probing, and philosophically fascinating show, exposing a society darkly sinister. Her colleague Nancy Durrant reviews Vienna itself, concluding (as did Adrian Searle) with Klimt's unfinished Portrait of Amalie Zuckerkandl:
 Finally, and most poignantly, there is Klimt's 1918 portrait of Amalie Zuckerkandl, unfinished at his death. By this time, the war nearly over, the Empire was on its knees. Sittings for the picture, commissioned by the industrialist Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, of whose family Zuckerkandl was a close friend, were difficult. Zuckerkandl was away, working in a hospital on the front line with her doctor husband. Even taking into account its unfinished state, this bold, almost severe work betrays the bleak uncertainty facing both sitter and artist.Klimt died that same year. Zuckerkandl's story is harsher. A Christian who had converted to Judaism in order to marry Herr Zuckerkandl, she and her husband divorced after the First World War. The association was enough for the Nazis however – she and her children were deported to a concentration camp during the Second World War, where she was murdered. Cruelly cut off, her portrait serves as a beautiful, terrible closing testament to a time of both great cultural flowering and its ultimate decay.