See rare and fragile drawings by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, offering intimate insights into their artistic relationship and differing creative processes. This extraordinary collaboration with the Albertina Museum in Vienna marks the centenary of both artists’ deaths.

1918 was a seismic year in Vienna. As the Austro-Hungarian Empire crumbled, the deaths of its two foremost artists brought about the end of an intense period of creative vitality that had blazed briefly but brilliantly across the city’s bohemian swirl. One was the radical Symbolist painter Gustav Klimt; the other the young, scandalous and prodigiously talented Egon Schiele.

As a number of key drawings in this exhibition will reveal, influence travelled in both directions between these two friendly rivals. Early sketches show how Schiele, in his own words, first “went by way of Klimt,” before the expressive power and searing directness of his mature work in turn left a mark on his older colleague. Both revelled in the immediacy of drawing, an ideal medium for exploring new ideas of modernity, subjectivity and the erotic.

Klimt / Schiele: Drawings is a unique opportunity to see some of the 20th century’s most important works on paper – amongst them Klimt’s sketches for his seminal Beethoven Frieze, and unflinching self-portraits by Schiele – which due to their delicacy will not see the light of day again for many years. In around 100 portraits, landscapes, nudes and erotic drawings, prepare to encounter these two icons of Modernism at their most raw and revealing.

Anni Albers, Study for Unexecuted Wallhanging 1926. The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation © Estate of Anni Albers; ARS, NY & DACS, London 2017

As a student at the radical and ostensibly egalitarian Bauhaus art school, Anni Albers, like other women, was barred from becoming a painter. Instead she enrolled in the weaving workshop and made textiles her means of expression. Albers (1899–1994) rose to become an influential figure, exploring the technical limits of hand-weaving to pioneer innovative uses of woven fabric as art, architecture and design. Tate Modern’s full-scale retrospective explores this influential but rarely seen trailblazer for a new interdisciplinary art form. It brings together the most important examples of her work, from beautiful small-scale creations to wall hangings, as well as exploring the textiles she designed for mass-production and her use of new technologies and synthetic fibres.

Organised by Tate Modern and Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf

Girl with a White Dog 1950-1 Lucian Freud 1922-2011 Purchased 1952

It features artists including Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon alongside rarely seen work from their contemporaries including Frank Auerbach and Paula Rego. Many of them lived or live in London, drawn to the multicultural capital from around the world. Three important works by Francis Bacon will be shown in the UK for the first time in at least three decades.

The exhibition also shows how this spirit in painting was fostered by the previous generation, from Walter Sickert to David Bomberg, and how contemporary artists continue to express the tangible reality of life through paint.