In March of 1938, Wilhelm Thöny and his wife Thea set out for New York, where they had previously visited in 1933. Just as before with the move to Paris, there most likely were a number of reasons for the trip, not least among them the impending war.

The soaring skyscrapers against a dark blue sky do not match any actual view of New York. But as the title emphasizes, we are dealing with a "paraphrase" here, rather than with a depiction of reality. Thöny has borrowed a musical term referring to the embellishment of a theme. And, to extend the musical metaphor, the key has changed compared to the earlier New York views the artist created in the Paris studio following his first trip to America. Thöny was no longer the visitor overwhelmed at the first sight of the skyline, but rather a resident right in the middle of it, though still foreign. The flat at the Barbizon Plaza Hotel where the couple lived was small and also had to serve as a studio. These cramped conditions became palpable in the framing of the image, with the dark wall surface taking up almost a quarter of the space and the rambling greenery in the vase forming yet another barrier towards the seemingly distant outside.

The intimate pencil drawing by Gustav Klimt is a preliminary study for his painting Philosophie (Philosophy), which was originally intended for the ceiling of the Great Hall at the University of Vienna. In 1894, the Ministry of Education commissioned artist Franz Matsch and Gustav Klimt, who together formed the Artists Company, to create a central painting, which was to be framed by allegorical representations of the four Vienna faculties. Klimt undertook the faculty paintings, Philosophie, Medizin and Jurisprudenz (Philosophy, Medicine, and Law).

During his preparations, his style changed from Historicism to Symbolism. Klimt deviated increasingly from not only the approved design drawings but the artistic and moral sensibility of his time. Instead of traditional allegorical representations, the artist, who had engaged intensively with Sigmund Freud's research on sexuality and the unconscious, turned to socially taboo topics. However, the many nude figures and explicit representations of sexuality drew opposition from the client and professors, and its public presentation at the Vienna Secession in 1900 was met with general disapproval and indignation, developing into one of Austria's greatest art scandals. Klimt protested against the attacks on artistic freedom and withdrew from the commission, relinquishing his fee.

Famous not only for his paintings and sculptures, Max Klinger also made a name for himself as an innovator in printmaking; his contemporaries compared him with none other than Albrecht Dürer. His cycle Dramen (dramas) occupies a unique position within his series of prints. Firstly, it eschews symbolic elements; secondly, Opus IX brings together two storylines, each of which forms a self-contained sequence of three pictures: Eine Mutter I, II und II (A Mother I, II, and III) and Märztage I, II und III (March Days I, II, and III). These stories are each preceded by two sheets, the content of which lays the groundwork for what is to come.

Although the title alludes to the German Revolution of 1848–1849, which also entered history as the March Revolution, Max Klinger frees the events from their historical context, showing instead the Berlin of his time, with its telegraph wires and advertising columns. "Around this time, a slogan was circulating through the press that sprin – March especially – was the time of ferment in both nature and politics", explains Klinger in a Letter to Max Lahrs 1916.

His cycle can be read as a warning that the unresolved political and social grievances caused by rapid industrialisation may lead to a repeat of the events of 1848–1849.

One of the most influential texts of the women's movement is A Room of One's Own, published by the British writer Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) in 1929. In the essay, the author points out how important it is to have a personal retreat for creative work. However, at the time, very few artists had access to this luxury and were therefore forced to make compromises.

"I now draw considerably more than I paint from the practical consideration that, in Berlin, in the first few years of my marriage, I hardly had enough money to rent a studio", Käthe Kollwitz wrote to her fellow artist Paul Hey in February 1891. "And to paint oil paintings in the cramped rooms in which one resides is a sorry thought. Etching is far less laborious." The early self-portrait shows the artist seated at a dining table in her Berlin apartment. The centre of the young family's life, the large room features the baby carriage, and it is also where she produces her first etchings.

This moving drawing shows Egon Schiele in an intimate embrace with his new wife Edith, née Harms, who lived in a house on Hietzinger Hauptstraße opposite Schiele's studio. In 1914, a love affair began between the two. After Schiele's separation from his long-term partner, his model and muse Wally Neuzil, Edith and Egon Schiele married in June 1915, shortly after his conscription into military service.

The couple were to meet a sad end. The 1918–1919 influenza pandemic was running rampant and is said to have claimed more lives than the First World War. Edith, who was six months pregnant, fell ill. Schiele, by now infected himself, drew his wife one last time in her deathbed, following her into death three days later on October 31st, 1918. His final words, recorded by his sister-in-law Adele Harms, proved true: "The war is over – and I must go!"

Despite his short life, Schiele joins Richard Gerstl, Gustav Klimt, and Oskar Kokoschka as one of the key figures of Modernism in Austria. His expressive pictorial language and radical representations of the body blazed a trail for a number of twentieth-century artists, including Günter Brus, Francis Bacon, and Elke Krystufek.