The Vienna Secession filled the difficult art-world summer gap with revolutionary panache and imaginative profundity. Curator Pierre Bal-Blanc, head of the Centre d’Art Contemporain in the Paris suburb of Brétigny, called with impeccable logic for the death not of the author but of the audience. Why should the public any more than the artist be compartmentalized or privileged?

The thirty-five artists included are all over fifty years old, having lived through and possibly been influenced by the rebellions of the 1960s; marginalized both by institutions and by the art market, they have cultivated

For more than ten years, Clemens Wolf’s studio was the street. He eventually switched from street art to painting of an almost classical kind. His technique and subjects are still reminiscent of graffiti, but his conceptual ambition has deepened: “I wanted to engage with ideas, and for that graffiti/street art didn’t seem quite the right medium.” In the works in his recent exhibition, “Hinter der Freiheit” (Behind Freedom), he applied oil paint to canvas via spray gun and stencil; he took his motifs from photographs of derelict buildings and industrial ruins—the very places where the artist,