Wein

29-08-07

I went to the Lichtenstein Museum, which took me about 45 minutes to locate, only to discover that the palace was closed, contrary to the information that was printed in The Lonely Planet Guidebook - but since I was the only one there, the book lived up to its name. The museum is supposed to have a decent art collection that includes a Rembrandt, a Raphael, and several Reubens.

On the way to the Wien Museum, I decided to partake myself of a slice of chocolate cake at the Stadtbahn which was designed by Otto Wagner. The Stadtbahn consists of a train station and a café. The train station has a little museum that gives a brief history and details some of the great buildings that were built by a superb modern architect.

The history of Vienna is told at the Wien Museum at the Karlplatz starting with the Romans and up to the present. The highlight of the museum is the room devoted to Secession painters, which include Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Richard Gerstl and also the painter/composer Arnold Schönberg.

The life of Richard Gerstl is full of drama and tragedy. He was a talented painter, doing Impressionist style landscapes using dots, perhaps influenced by the French painter Seurat. There are only 70 of his paintings and drawings that have survived. Gerstl saw the art of the Secession movement as pompous. This brought him into conflict with his art professor Christian Griepenkerl who denounced Gerstl by stating “The way you paint, I piss in the snow!” He was a difficult person, did not fraternize with his fellow students, and rejected an invitation to participate in a procession honoring Franz Joseph I. On the other hand, he was friendly with two of Vienna’s major composers, Mahler and Schönberg.

Gerstl painted several paintings of Schönberg and his family, but had an affair with Schönberg’s wife Mathilde. When Schönberg found out, he gave his wife an ultimatum to choose who she wanted to live with. Staying with her husband, who was a temperamental tyrant, was a crushing blow to Gerstl. Isolated from the intellectual community, distraught by his lover’s rejection, and depressed by his futile career he committed suicide, but only after destroying all his works. He died in 1908 at the age of 25. Mathilde died in 1923 – her remaining life with Schönberg was miserable.

The second floor of the museum has a three-dimensional scale model of the city of Vienna from the 1700’s during the peak of the Habsburg Empire. There were protective walls (glacis) enclosing the city (some of which can still be seen) and the Stephansplatz district seemed almost like an island compared to the present as there were few buildings in the neighboring areas. Also lining the walls of the museum were numerous 18^th century landscape paintings of Vienna done by local artists – it was interesting to see how Vienna looked nearly three hundred years ago.

The bottom floor was devoted to Roman excavations although I believe the artifacts are replicas. Because all the signs were in German, I was unable to learn the ancient history of Vienna.

Afterward, I bade farewell to the Kunsthistorisches Museum by checking out the Flemish/Dutch section of the collection. Peter Brueghel the Elder has some pastoral works that are so enjoyable to look at, yet at the same time require attention to detail as he was noted for placing hundreds of people in his paintings. The Tower of Babel is a wonderful painting, but my favorite was the sequence of the seasons, especially “Winter” depicting people ice skating in a typical gloomy Dutch winter scene. It reminded me of the book Hans Brinker or the Silver Skates by Mary Mapes Dodge – oddly enough an American novel from 1865.