Vienna

(From now on, in an effort to actually appear at all relevant... I'm going to work backwards to catch up on what I've missed, instead of working forwards. Cami and Pat pointed this out to me, and it makes a lot more sense than what I've been doing! 'Tis up to you whether you have the patience to check back for older posts - Norway, Germany...)

German word of the day: schmetterling = "butterfly".

We rose late this morning, and dad and I consulted maps over breakfast. Meanwhile, mum looked up the slew of museums she was interested in, to figure out where to find them all. It's a very neat system in Vienna: practically every museum in the city is located on or around the same huge block.

Mum's list read thus: the Silverkammer, the Sisi museum, the Imperial State apartments, and the Schatzkammer (the Imperial treasury). Four museums in one day, which she really enjoyed, and which breaks our Berlin record. Pip and dad decided they'd quite like a restful day, so they decided upon seeing the Butterfly Garden and then spending the rest of the day in our flat. I liked the idea of seeing the Butterfly Garden, but I had also put 2 and 2 together (it makes 5) and remembered that the artist Egon Schiele had been Austrian. Sure enough, the guidebook in our flat told me the largest collection of his work was held in the Leopold museum, only a few blocks away.



We set out together and reached the Hofburg, where mum departed to find her cluster of exhibits. The rest of us found the butterfly garden nearby, which turns out to be housed in a beautiful art-noveau glasshouse. We found the entrance after a bit of deliberation, and our camera lenses and glasses steamed up the moment we stepped inside. The interior is stuffed full of tropical trees and shrubs and creepers, with a pond built in the center and a walkway overhead designed to look like a half-fallen tree. The feeding stations for the butterflies are artificial flowers that get sprayed with honey each morning, but there are also hundreds of different breeds of real orchids blossoming all around the room. There are glass cases along the walls filled with chrysalises hung on sticks, some of them just-hatched, the butterflies hanging upside down to let their new wings dry out. There are dozens of little quail scurrying around the floor of the faux-jungle, and bronze statues of someone's idea of "native people" hidden in the greenery. It's quirky, but the effect is quite spectacular under the glass-and-metal roof. High up on the walls are plaster sculptures of gorgons and things; totally incongruous. I wondered if the building had been designed for something else, originally.



There weren't an awful lot of the insects to be seen, but at a guess I'd say they breed more of them in summer, when most tourists come. The main type on show, and the most conspicuous butterflies were those beautiful iridescent black-and-blue ones... that Pip tells me aren't actually Ulysses because their "tails" were wrong... but they were captivating nonetheless.





We spent about an hour there, and then I left dad and Pip, and struck out for the "MuseumsQuartier" on my own. I had a map with me that I'd sketched out roughly that morning, showing me how to get to the Leopold, and how to get back "home" in the afternoon.

The building itself is quite striking from the outside. It was only built as recently as 2001, and it is basically a giant white cube with a few windows dotting the sides. I went in, and discovered that while the outside looks good, the inside is hellishly confusing. You deposit your coat around a corner before buying your ticket... then enter the museum-proper to buy your audioguide from a different desk around the corner... and then have to go up to a different level to find the loo. The way the stairs are designed means that you have to stride through two or three dislocated rooms per level to find the stairs that'll take you up one level further. The closest thing to a map you can get at the info desk is a list of who's work is shown on each level; it's like they're guarding the secret of the floorplan. No photos, no coats, no bags, no sideways looks. I've no idea whether it's the desired effect, but the gallery's architecture and general atmosphere leaves you in the perfect frame of mind to appreciate Schiele's paintings: alienated and confused. Hmm. Clever?



I would have had lunch before venturing into the exhibitions, but the cafe was veiled in a cloud of cigarette smoke, and I decided I really wasn't that hungry any more. Back down the stairs I went, to the floor where Egon Schiele's name was listed.

His paintings were more amazing in the original than I had anticipated. I had been intrigued by the reproductions I had seen, and come to know his art by, but up close... the colours are so vivid, and his lines are so incredibly precise. The first room I entered showed his early works, mostly landscapes - with dilapidated old buildings drawn without any straight lines, and painted with watered-down oils so that it looks like every wall is damp and mildewed. The only bright colours are he used are painted along the washing lines. His trees look like bowed-down people.

Further on, there was a sizeable collection of the paintings he's famous for: his nude figures and self-portraits. At this point, anyone who's reading my blog and has firm ideas about nudity and eroticism being improper... had better skip the rest of this post. If you read on you may injure yourself, and the links aren't "safe for work".

The reason I have been captivated by Schiele's figures since I came across them is their full-on intensity. Not a single person he painted is ever "idealised", and the most contorted and ugly of all his paintings are his self-portraits. He is wholly unflattering. Angles replace curves; arms and legs get pushed and pulled all over the place. Every line is placed as though it were on a split-second whim, and yet the anatomy is perfect every time. He painted skin in purples and greens and poison-yellows, and yet it's still, convincingly, skin. Egon Schiele's figures are emaciated, or they bulge and blush in all the most embarrassing places... and their faces are coy or painfully self-conscious or even wildly angry... and yet they're so much more "real" than people painted by other artists. I've been a prude before, and some of his paintings can still make me wince... but it's precisely the fact that his art is so uncompromising that makes me admire it. I suspect the man himself was a total nutter (angry - egotistical - terrified by but driven almost entirely by sex and death). If his uncle had succeeded in dissuading him from art, I wonder whether his next choice of outlet would have been homicide or raving lunacy. But he was brave. Or maybe just arrogant.

They were displaying his 1910 Nude Self Portrait, which I'd seen reproduced before. It's a lot bigger than I had thought, and the colours more vibrant. It's also very hard to look at, in the original; those violent red genitals and those crazed eyes. It is entirely unsettling, and incredibly powerful.

On the opposite wall was a painting I didn't remember seeing before, called "The Hermits". It shows two men wearing black clothes and draped around each other in such a way that you can't tell where one ends and the other begins. My audioguide pointed out that their faces were likenesses of Schiele, and his artistic idol Gustav Klimt (you know him: he painted THIS). Klimt is shown with his eyes closed, and as though he were resting on Schiele's shoulders. Schiele's eyes, on the other hand, are wide-open and angry... and as far as I could tell, the garland he's wearing is a ring of thistles. There's a lone rosebush painted in the background, and it's all wilted and dry. I was fascinated by the picture; it seemed so totally arrogant in its assumptions about Klimt and its declarations about Schiele's own originality... and at the same time, the artist seemed so totally terrified by his own brilliance. I gather Schiele painted it in one go, in a towering mood, and refused to change it in any way, ever again; to him it was painted totally "in the moment". After seeing this painting, I begin to understand the whole idea of expressionism. Makes me wish fervently that I could put that much feeling into my own pictures - but then I think, "at what price"?

There were lots of other paintings that amazed me, and one or two that appalled me. Judging by his paintings, he seems to have had a real fear of female sexuality before he married... and a kind of scorn for it afterwards. The earlier pictures of women have malevolent, angry expressions and lewd poses; the later pictures of women have homogenous faces, and look more like objects than individual people. He painted a lot of scenes of mothers with children; most of the mothers portrayed are either dead, inhuman, or blind. I can't help but feel that this is a man who had seriously disturbing psychological issues; but even in the midst of being disturbed by many of his subjects, I'm awed by his creativity and freedom of expression. Mind you, that got him into trouble, as well. He was accused and then found not-guilty of "sexual impropriety with a minor" or somesuch wording; and when that charge was dropped, he was sentenced to three days in prison on charges of obscenity. Somehow, the second charge seems to have honestly surprised him...

Well. Mixed as my feelings are, my conclusion is that I like his art. And I certainly got a lot of thinking done in that exhibition. Before I returned to our apartment, I also headed upstairs to see what the museum had of Klimt's work. "The Kiss" is hung elsewhere, but I saw his "Life and Death", which is beautiful up close. I also came across a very sad story about Klimt's early work. You see, there was a lovely (though tiny) painting of a girl in a lace dress hanging on one wall, painted so realistically I had assumed it was a photograph. Turns out it was instead an example of Klimt's early work, long before the decorative, gold-leaf style everyone recognises now. When Klimt was just becoming popular for this traditional, idealised style, he and another artist were offered a commission by the Vienna university. They were to paint allegories of philosophy, jurisprudence and medicine for the uni's faculty ceilings.

Klimt set to work, and had a sort of artistic revelation halfway through his preparatory sketches. Suddenly he had abandoned the traditional, acceptable style he'd become known for, and began painting his nude figures like real people - old as well as young; at different stages of health; some pregnant. He filled space with dozens of figures painted this way, his brushstrokes almost impressionistic across their skin, their poses strange and energetic. He started filling the gaps with the spirals and golden patterns everyone recognises from his later work.

And when he was finished, and presented the paintings... a group of 87 professors from the uni signed a petition demanding that the shockingly non-traditional works not be displayed. When the higher-ups argued, the debate went public. Tens of thousands of people came to see the modern, "ugly" paintings. Newspapers accused Klimt of deliberately trying to provoke people, and made nasty comments speculating whether anything uglier had ever been painted. In desperation, Klimt bought back the paintings, and didn't exhibit anything publicly for the next 5 years. I can't think of anything that would be so soul-crushing to a painter who truly thought his developments would be appreciated by the public. The paintings were eventually destroyed in a fire on the last day of World War 1; it's like a last jarring twist in the whole painful story. All that is left of the works are black and white photos.

So. Austrian art history is a mix of amazing, upsetting, and inspiring. For all of Schiele's personality quirks and flaws, and Klimt's unacceptability among the public of his day, the two have become Austrian national artistic heroes. There is a lot of speculation in this museum about "what might have been" if Schiele had lived past 28... or if Klimt hadn't been so crushed by the public scandal his art provoked. But I kinda suspect the element of mystery is part of the artist's appeal. I mean, poor Schiele watched his pregnant wife die of the Spanish influenza, and succumbed to the same disease three days later. If that kind of personal tragedy hadn't occurred, and he'd painted on into his old age, would his intensity have burned out? Would his work have become unfashionable?

I have rambled; all depart!