Facing the Modern: The Portrait in Vienna 1900, National Gallery, review For example, if like me you'd always thought of Schiele's or Kokoschka's twisted and tormented portraits as visual manifestations of Freud's writings about neurosis and hysteria, just take a look at the work of one of their predecessors, the surpassingly strange Anton Romako, who died in 1889. His pendant portraits of the newspaper man Christoph Reisser and his wife Isabella are so unsettling that on first seeing them I found I'd inadvertently taken a step backwards. Husband and wife are seen from head on, as though caught in the beam of a headlamp. Dressed to the nines, Isabella smiles as she knows she must. But what a smile:self-conscious and tearful, she bares her white teeth as if she might bite us. Christoph, by contrast is a big powerful man who crumples that day's newspaper in one hand. Assured, calm and self -confident, he could be a psychiatrist, she his patient. Those who sat to Schiele and Kokoschka were mostly artists, models, architects, musicians and writers - and many of them loathed the result. It must have taken courage to sit for him, as it certainly did to have your portrait painted by Richard Gerstl, whose 1905 double portrait of the sisters Karoline and Pauline Fey was painted swiftly and spontaneously in a single sitting. The women are shown in the white gowns they are still wearing after their return from a ball. They were only in their early 20s but Gerstl makes them look like old women, staring straight ahead with wide open eyes against a densely painted black background, like ghosts enveloped in white shrouds. Gerstl is one of the first painters to make a conscious decision to paint ugly pictures, the forerunner of Dubuffet. His furious brushwork and smears of pink and violet paint scumbled into the grey-white flesh in the famous nude self portrait painted shortly before his suicide in 1908 tips over into incoherency, but this is a deliberate response to the lushly decorative but equally incoherent passages of painting you find in the portraits of Klimt. Neither of these pictures was commissioned and the Fey family did not acquire the portrait of Karoline and Pauline, something to bear in mind when you engage with works by the more progressive painters in this show. Egon Schiele: The Family (Self Portrait) " of 1918. Egon Schiele/ © Leopold Museum Private Foundation, Vienna Elsewhere, the exhibition sets up comparisons between traditional and modern painting, as in the contrast between a banal portrait of the Markl Family painted in 1907 by the popular society painter Alois Delug and one of Schiele's last and most thrilling works, The Family (Self Portrait) " of 1918. Whereas Frau Markl and her children are almost suffocated by the amount of clothing they are wearing, Schiele's nude "family" squats before us, the woman in front of the man and the baby in front of the woman, like a parody of the renaissance depiction of the Holy Family or Trinity. Though there is no question as to which is the greater work of art, the comparison is unfair: the woman in Schiele's picture is a model, not his wife, and the child is imaginary. In fact, I believe that the work is not actually a true portrait at all, but a symbolist subject picture that might have been called "Life" in the manner of a sculptural group by Rodin. Many of the pictures in this exhibition are of the highest possible quality and those that are not are used to help us understand how and why the luxuriant flowering of painting in fin de siècle Vienna came about. The show is original, inquisitive and courageous in the way it explores an area of art history that as far as I know has not been examined before. But none of this makes up for the show's multiple failures: of the installation, of the labelling, and of the catalogue. I urge the National Gallery to rehang the entire exhibition chronologically, and to re- write most of the labels so they give us basic information, such as who the sitters are, and what is known about their lives. At the moment the show is more like an illustrated lecture than an exhibition, and the pity is that with so many wonderful pictures it could have been unforgettable. As it is now, a once- in- a -lifetime opportunity has been squandered. Facing the Modern The Portrait in Vienna 1900 until January 12. Tickets: 0844 847 2409: nationalgallery.org.uk