August 11th, 2016

STRANGE SHORE: Vienna & Budapest

SUNDRY LAND: Austria & Hungary

WANDERING WAY: Art Explorations Abroad – “Kunst” and “Művészet” Discoveries in Vienna and Hungary…The Belvedere (Upper and Lower), The Leopold Museum, Secession, Klimt Villa, The Kunsthistorische Museum, the Albertina, and the Hungarian National Gallery (or Magyar Nemzeti Galéria).

Ah, Hungary. As I was sampling an extraordinarily tasty Magyar wine, the vinologist at “The Tasting Table”(http://welovebudapest.com/shops.and.services.1/take.a.seat.at.tasting.table.to.try.hungary.s.top.wines.and.foods) argued that Hungarians can be every bit as tetchy as the Viennese in response to a story about my “RBF Viennese” travelogue post.

I just laughed as he poured another generous glass of excellent Szászi Szürkebarát 2014 (http://borbolt.hu/szaszi-szurkebarat-2014/t/7027), which cost me around the equivalent of $3 (maybe less – Hungarian Forints aren’t the easiest to convert in one’s head, particularly when one's drinking wine). I hate to contradict such a jovial barkeep, but I’ve found Hungarians to be sociable, friendly, and perfectly willing to chat at great length about their delight that you’ve decided to visit Budapest. In response to my enthusiastic comparisons between Prague and Budapest, this same vinologist observed that Budapest has all the charms of Prague without the crush of tourists. He has a point.

Moreover, Hungarians have twin relationships with wine and pastry that rival the Viennese dedication to coffee and cake. For example, I happened to be strolling down a side street in Budapest when I smelled something that can only be described as divine, and I found a sign advertising “Traditional Hungarian Jewish Cake,” which made sense since I was two steps away from the Great Synagogue (Dohány utcai zsinagóga, http://www.budapestbylocals.com/budapest-great-synagogue.html). 

Intrigued, I ordered a slice from the smiling proprietress, who was totally thrilled that an American had stopped into her little storefront. To describe this cake as delicious doesn’t come close to capturing the delicate yet completely fulfilling balance of flavors, and I expect that I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to perfect a decent recipe.

Now that I’m rejuvenated after several days of Hungarian welcome, wine, and pastry, I feel equal to the task of relating my ambitious art-seeing itinerary, i.e., seven museums in a week. For all of my griping about Vienna, there is no denying that a visit is absolutely necessary if you care about painting, sculpture, or art history. Given the empire-building proclivities of the Habsburgs, the city’s museum collections resound with the mission statement: “We WILL and HAVE conquered Europe, you pathetic little termites." Plus, hey, those groovy, free-love Klimt and Schiele guys lived in Vienna, too.

Since there’s no way that I can spend three days in this Hungarian café – despite its laidback conviviality – describing all of the art I’ve seen; once again, I’ll restrict my remarks to describing a favorite artwork at each museum. Away we go!

1) Upper Belvedere (https://www.belvedere.at/bel_en/belvedere/upper_belvedere). Just to confuse things right away, the Belvedere is separated into two parts, the upper and lower sections of the old palace. The palace itself is a marvel, and here are a few pictures to give you some sense of the aspirant "Wish-We-Were-Versailles" groundskeeping as well as its sweeping architecture.   

Viennese guards are quite strict about not allowing tourists to take photographs (surprise, surprise), which I discovered after taking a non-flash picture of these medieval sculptures.

Probably disconcerted that anyone had ventured into the medieval wing, the guard emoted in emotional German before signing the universal, "Put down the damn camera, idiot," gesture. I’m pleased to report that no one actually dared to confiscate my iPhone, which might have awakened the raging beast within. Despite this drama, the snap turned out quite well, and so the lucky readers of "Strange and Sundry" may gaze upon sculptures that you'd have to travel all the way to Vienna to see otherwise. Ha! 

Now, the paintings! Tourists swarm around Klimt’s masterworks, particularly “The Kiss” – shrill tour guides, screaming brats, and malodorous crowds kill the viewing experience (much as is the case with The Louvre’s Mona Lisa), and so I’d vote for Egon Schiele’s “Portrait of Dr. Hugo Koller (1918)” as my favorite piece. It hangs in a quiet corridor next to other paintings about which tourists don’t care a hoot. Sigh, there's nothing like appreciating a painting without being elbowed in the ribs.

 Look at all the books! Dr. Koller must’ve been a happy man! My kinda guy! Plus, shouldn't we all coordinate our suits to match our favorite armchairs? Survey says...yes!

In providing Dr. Koller some happy company, the Belvedere offers other "reader portraits," and I just love paintings of people reading – can’t imagine why. For example, here are Max Beckmann’s “Reclining Woman with Book and Irises (1931)"

and Lovis Corinth’s “Woman Reading Near a Goldfish Tank (1911)”

For anyone who wants to geek out and learn more about "reader portraiture", please check out this book: “Women Who Read are Dangerous”(https://www.amazon.com/Women-Who-Read-Are-Dangerous/dp/0789212560/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1470914002&sr=8-7&keywords=Reading+Women+art). Dangerous indeed.

2) Lower Belvedere. After a lazy walk through the decadent palace gardens (that were designed by "Dominique Gerard, who had trained in the gardens of Versaille as a pupil of André Le Notre" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belvedere,_Vienna), one reaches the less popular Lower Belvedere, where the madding crowds snubbed a fascinating exhibition, "Sin and Secession: Franz von Stuck in Vienna": https://www.belvedere.at/franz-von-stuck_en. Too bad for them! Although I didn't know a thing about Franz von Stuck before arriving in Vienna, the artist turned out to be one nutty dude who floated around Secessionist circles, the Viennese cadre of Art Nouveau practitioners led by Klimt and Max Kurzweil (https://www.belvedere.at/bel_en/exhibition/max_kurzweil). 

Following in the footsteps of the fawning Pre-Raphaelites, Von Stuck displays a bizarre penchant for randy satyrs and limpid nymphs of all ilk, and he more or less "stuck" (hardy-har-har) with these fantastical motifs for his entire career. In promoting his oversexed mythological figures, Von Stuck struck upon the idea of having baddies gaze straight ahead with "crazy-contact-lens" glares – see "Lucifer(1890/91)," "Medusa(1892)," and "Sin (1895)" looking like horror posters: 

Apparently, “Sin” caused some fainting spells at its first public viewing. Alas, no one seems to faint in the twenty-first century. Rather a shame, really. Doubtlessly livens up an art exhibition. 

3) Secession – Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze (https://www.secession.at/en/). Don’t imagine that Klimt will go unmentioned in the city that hawks his art on coffee cups, t-shirts, scarves, porcelain, and (of course) cake -- let’s travel to the Secession! The practitioners of Viennese Art Nouveau (or Jugendstile, in German) built this beautiful museum for the display of contemporary art at the fin de siècle, and the Secession still attempts to carry out this "au courant" mission by setting up exhibitions for current artists. I did not see another living soul looking at the work of the twenty-first contemporaries on display. To be fair, I don't remember those artists myself. Klimt’s wonderful Beethoven Frieze still steals the show.

Here are a few images from the Frieze, and the museum provides handy crib notes for the Wagnerian symbolism in this representation of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Like anyone else, I adore the giant Winged Sasquatch-Bigfoot representing the evils afflicting mankind: http://www.gustav-klimt.com/Beethoven-Frieze.jsp#prettyPhoto[image1]/0/ over which the valiant knight must triumph:

Plus, as someone who felt she might suffocate in front of "The Kiss" at the Upper Belvedere, I relished the chance to see Klimt's "The Kiss To the Whole World" that celebrates the bravura ending of the Ninth Symphony, complete with heavenly choir:

4)The Leopold Museum. Unlike their compadres at the Belvedere, the proprietors of The Leopold Museum are totally cool with people taking pictures. As a possible result of this laissez-faire policy however, the “Schiele drawings” on display are actually facsimiles, a little fact that I confirmed with an employee in the gift shop who looked a little sheepish that I’d noticed. Hmmm… However, the oils are real-life, genuine oil paintings, and “The Leopold” displays one extraordinary Klimt, “Death and Life 1910/11, reworked 1915/16:" 

It makes one shudder to guess what that guy's about to do with the club... Oh death, always ruining the party.

Moreover, the Leopold holds largest collection of Egon Schiele’s work in the world, which is pretty darn cool. Of Schiele’s paintings, I vote for "Self-Portrait with Raised Bare Shoulder (1912)" and “Self-Portrait with Chinese Lantern Print (1912)" as twin favorites. Flash-backing to 1912, you can almost hear Schiele asking, "Do you think I look better from this side...? Or this side? I have TWO good sides, don't I? Yeah, I totally do."

5) Klimt Villa (http://www.klimtvilla.at/?lang=en). One must take a short journey to reach Klimt Villa, and I was tickled to figure out the Viennese tram system all by myself. To be fair, the Viennese trams operate on the “trust system,” and a moderately intelligent dachshund could probably deduce the basic principles behind their operation… It may, in fact, have been the design goal, given the Viennese love for dachshunds (https://www.1stdibs.com/furniture/decorative-objects/sculptures/vienna-bronze-lovely-dog-figurine-dachshund-made-circa-1900/id-f_1058084/).  

Upon reaching the inner suburbs of the Vienna, the populace mellowed considerable. The young gentleman running Klimt Villa was delighted to have

1) a visitor, and

2) a visitor FROM NEW YORK CITY?!?

I thought he might just call it a day after I departed.

For ten euros, you can see Klimt’s Studio, Klimt’s pencil drawings of his amorous models, AND Egon Schiele’s two portraits of Klimt – these last two would be worth the price of admission all by themselves:

As the admittedly high proportion of my readers who happen to be art historians will know, Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele were contemporaries, and Schiele hero-worshipped Klimt to such an extent that the young man rented the villa down the street from his “father figure.” In my favorite anecdote, which was plastered on the wall of Klimt Villa (natch), this dialogue supposedly took place between the two artists:

Schiele: “[I’d] gladly give several of [my] drawings for one of [yours].”

Klimt: “Why do you want to exchange with me? You already draw better than I do anyway…”

By all accounts, Klimt was an awfully nice guy who would occasionally impregnate his adoring models who showed off “Klimt hickeys” with pride, according to the curators anyway.

Most excitingly, the bored (and easily impressed) ticket-seller gave me directions to Schiele’s villa, about a block and a half away. A woman popped her head out of the first-floor apartment window to inquire why the hell I was taking photos of her building, but she smiled when I replied, “Schiele lived here!”

6) The Kunsthistorische Museum (https://www.khm.at/en/). The gargantuan Kunsthistorische Museum houses the bulk of the “Old Master” paintings acquired during the Habsburg reign, which gives you some sense of those emperors’ scope and power, especially after you consider all the art you’ve already seen in Upper and Lower Belvedere. Caravaggio, Titian, Van Dyck, etc…lots and lots and lots superior examples of their best efforts, and this collection is housed in palatial quarters so breathtaking that you don't immediately notice the Klimt paintings decorating the neo-baroque stairwell. 

It’s almost impossible to pick a single piece from this mind-blowing collection, but I was awestruck to discover the largest collection of Pieter Brueghel the Elder paintings on the planet. Brueghel is one of my favorite artists of all time – he has been since college. Stunned, I blurt out, “Those? Those… Those are HERE?” In my opinion, these are the best Brueghels of the bunch, “The Fight Between Carnival and Lent (1559), Children’s Games (1560), The Tower of Babel (1563):

When I first began studying the works of Geoffrey Chaucer way, way back in college, my brilliant professor David Wallace remarked that you could learn a great deal about Chaucer's world by examining the encyclopedic paintings of Pieter Brueghel the Elder, an artist who chronicles secular, peasant life in all its ideological complexity, mundane physicality, and ribald humor. Brueghel even imagines Babel itself as a brick-and-mortar fabrication built by someone, somewhere, sometime. In inscribing the details of everyday life, Brueghel envisions the medieval world as a human experience, just as Chaucer imagined the whole of medieval society by relating the stories of few pilgrims traveling to Canterbury. 

7)Albertina (http://www.albertina.at/en). Well, here's another staggering collection in another palatial residence, stretched along corridors so long that you can’t see any end to the splendor.

Although I tried to visit the greatest collections, Vienna is so full of museums that I still haven’t seen them all. I did try! 

At Albertina, I spent a couple hours in the extraordinary exhibition, “Monet to Picasso,” which, yes, charts the progression of Impressionism to Post-Impressionism to Modernism with examples from German Expressionism, New Objectivity, and Russian Avant-Garde thrown in for good measure. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to attend this exhibition if you want a basic primer in the history of modern art (http://www.albertina.at/en/monet_to_picasso).

Despite this fascinating, absorbing survey, Albertina most astounded when I decided, “Hey, why not visit the staterooms with the permanent collection? Let’s see what they’ve got.” Well, “they’ve got” the precise, pristine, and famous Dürer watercolor "Hare" alongside one of Dürer's most moving drawings. I couldn’t stop looking at every single line of these masterpieces. I love Dürer, that perfect perfectionist. Love him. For your own inspection and pleasure, here are Albrecht Dürer’s “Hare (1502)” and “Head of an Old Man (1521)”:

Moreover, since all the tourists were in the exhibition, I could look at these Dürer drawings in peace for as long as I wished. I felt like a Habsburg.

Well, I just can’t sleep if I don’t read a trashy novel or watch Netflix before bed, and so I’ll continue with the unique Hungarian contributions to Art Nouveau tomorrow. After seeing the Hungarian National Gallery (Magyar Nemzeti Galéria), I’ve become convinced that everyone in the United States should know the name Jószef Rippl-Római.