Museums

Vienna is supposed to have one of the finest Natural History museums in the world dating back to the 18^th century. The current collection is at a neo-Renaissance building identical to the art museum 200 meters away. The highlight of the collection is the 25,000 year old nude Venus of Willendorf- named because it was discovered in 1908 near Willendorf. I was surprised to see how small the nude figure was with no visible face, yet she was enormous at the same time with a swollen stomach perhaps indicating that she was pregnant.

Germany has been one of the hot spots for discovering dinosaur fossils and there was an impressive display of a prehistoric turtle, but the hyped skeleton of an Iguanodon was actually a cast as the real figure is in Brussels. Also worth noting was a skeleton of a wooly mammoth.

Austria has had a bevy of meteor rocks smash into the country, thus the museum displayed hundreds of them- some huge. There was a small chunk of moon rock that was given to Austria by Richard Nixon in 1973.

I took the metro to the Secession Building which was architecturally rich and
possessing historical significance despite having a small collection of art
highlighted by a single painting by Gustav Klimt. The Secession was founded in 1897
by about 15 Viennese artists who broke away from academic art and architecture and
strived to be innovative as stated by their motto, "To the Age Its Art, to Art its
Freedom." The first president of the Secession was Klimt and the group had shows
at the Secession building where they showcased their latest controversial paintings.
Many works were deemed too controversial for conservative Vienna. The most notorious
example was the rejection of three Klimt murals "Philosophy, Medicine, and
Jurisprudence” intended for the Great Hall at the University of Vienna, based on
so-called pornographic themes. In one scene, there was an octopus strangling a nude
man, surrounded by three female figures representing Truth, Justice and Law. Klimt
eventually repossessed the works - later they were sold to Jewish patrons only to
have them confiscated and eventually destroyed by the Nazis in 1945.

The Academy of Fine Arts was founded in the 17th century and although it has only
has a couple hundred of paintings on display for public viewing, it is an excellent
collection. In modern times, the Academy is famous for rejecting Adolph Hitler twice
in 1907 and 1908 respectively as a student. An embittered Hitler blamed the Jewish
board for his rejections and lived as an impoverished amateur artist in Vienna until
World War I.

The most intriguing piece in the picture gallery collection is the Last Judgment
Triptych by Hieronymus Bosch- a 16th century Dutch painter. The Triptych is a
storyboard showing the downfall of Adam and Eve and leads up to the Last Judgment
showing Hell using some grotesque, yet intriguing form of art. Bosch put a lot of
figures into his paintings which would subsequently influence Pieter Bruegel.