At 10 in the morning we had a tour of the Leopold Museum with Dr. O. Leopold was a physician and private art collector. During his life he amassed quite a collection and became something of a celebrity in the art world; for instance, at art auctions his presence created a stir and people paid careful attention to what he purchased. He had a knack for buying paintings done buy artists who later because quite famous. As a result his collection is quite valuable. Vienna, that bastion of high culture, built an expensive modern museum for his art collection, and he in turn allowed the city to display his collection to the public.
To begin, allow me to say that Leopold and I had quite opposite tastes in art and that I hated the Leopold museum. It has a lot of Klimt and Schiele, and other similar painters. I hate impressionism and expressionism. A lot. I also hate rampant sexualization and eroticization in art. Klimt and Schiele were known womanizers and expressionists. Their art just looks like a jumble of colors, in which can be seen the forms of naked women. That about sums up Klimt, who made money on the Ringstraße and was always wealthy and happy. Schiele is worse; he was a tortured soul, had a ****ty childhood and spent a lot of his life poor and unhappy. As a result his art shows his pain. He feels his mother restricted his talent, and lots of his paintings depict blind mothers surrounded by little children. Schiele thought his mother was metaphorically blind. I hate art and poet that has more emotion that skill. Schiele is an artist and a poet whose work is perfectly described by that phrase. I hate Schiele. Dr. O says he was a master of something, I think lines or something like that. I prefer the Renaissance. I disliked all of the paintings in that museum, but the I hated the least is a Schiele called The Hermits. When Leopold finally finished his studies (I guess he was at the university for a while because European education is essentially free), his parents were going to get him a VW Bug as a graduation gift. Leopold said that would rather have a painting of about the same value that he knew to be on sale in London. He traveled to London to buy Schiele’s The Hermits. It’s a pretty large painting that is based on triangles. It shows Klimt and Schiele in dark monk’s habits. Schiele is in the foreground, leaning on Klimt who is in the background. The point is that Klimt supported Schiele’s career (Klimt was Schiele’s mentor) but that the Viennese art scene was changing and Schiele and his peers were now the dominant artists, and their expressionist style was at the “foreground” of Austrian art.
Dr. O told us that once the Leopold Museum had an exhibit of paintings displaying nude figures. As an advertising campaign, they declared that anyone who showed up to the ticket counter naked could get in for free. It worked; people would wear a trenchcoat or something to the museum, walk up to the counter and let it drop. They got in for free and for the length of the exhibit the Leopold Museum was full of butt naked people looking at paintings of butt naked people. It’s a situation that has the potential for sexiness, I guess. Oh, Vienna.
After the museum tour I went to the in-museum café. The coffee was ok, but I ordered this dip (because it was cheap and I wasn’t super hungry). It came with like three tiny pieces of bread and a ton of hummus and other dips. I had way more dip than bread. The same thing happened at a beer garden a few days later where we got lots of dip and only three slices of bread, albeit the slices were normal-sized. But at the Leopold Museum the bread was ridiculously small.
We had a two-hour lunch break during which I got some money from an ATM, and then Kathy led us on a walking tour of the Innere Stadt. We saw the famous Anker Clock, which apparently has a quite significant display at noon. Unfortunately I did not manage to get there at noon, but perhaps I will when I fly out of Vienna. We also went to the Judenplatz and talked about Vienna and the Jews. In the Judenplatz is a plaque commemorating a certain particularly bloody pogrom of the Middle Ages (Austria used to be really, really anti-Semitic). Also in the square is Vienna’s Holocaust memorial. The Viennese decided to leave the pogrom plaque up since it was near the Holocaust memorial and showed how far the Viennese had come as a people, and how they had reversed their anti-Semitism. The Holocaust memorial is a building made of books. All of the books are facing with the pages outward, so the spine (and the title) is concealed. They represent all of the Jewish lives that were cut short; their titles will now never be read. There are also a set of doors which don’t open and have no knobs (so they can never be opened) which also represents the loss the Jews experienced. Once can never enter the inside of the memorial, where the titles would be seen. Around the structure are the names of all of the concentration camps where Austrian Jews perished during the Shoah.
After the walking tour I went to Café Diglas, a great old traditional Viennese coffee house, to read the International Herald Tribune (the global edition of the New York Times, which is in English and which all the coffee houses in Vienna carry; I’m becoming quite fond of it) and drink some coffee. This was to pass the time until meeting Dom Ambros, which I did after the café.
The restaurant to which he had wanted to take me was closed, as was the next one we checked, and we ended up going to a Thai place. Ambros likes Thai food. It was very interesting watching him order. Ambros, an American, and the Thai lady, who was born in Asia, both conversing in fluent German, though it was not either’s native language. Oh, Vienna. After dinner we smoked cigars (Ambros, who lived the life of the very wealthy before committing his life to the Church, is well-versed in the ways of fine living). He taught me the proper way to smoke a cigar (always remove the label, all gentlemen know to do this) and pronounced that a good meal always ends with a cigar. I must say I agree, smoking a cigar after dinner was a very pleasant activity indeed. We strolled through the park around Karlskirche until he had to catch a taxi home (the canons have to wake up quite early for prayer services). We had some very very interesting conversation, but due to the personal nature of it I cannot relate it here. Suffice it so say Ambros is the most interesting person to whom I’ve ever spoken and I fully intend to remain in touch with him, though he did not and will not convert me to Catholicism.
No comments:
Post a Comment