From the beginning, I planned today as a free day, our first
“mental health day” of the trip. The
idea is to give the students a breather after particularly difficult
experiences. We’ve been studying the
Holocaust and visiting places of perpetration and places of commemoration
pretty much non-stop since they arrived on June 15th. Nine days in (out of twenty three) seemed a
good place for our first break. Also,
yesterday was our visit to Mauthausen, which was hard both physically and
emotionally.
Last night, the heat wave finally broke with a massive
storm. At 1:00 am, the windows rattled
and the rain poured down. I decided to
close the windows as the sound of the rain was nearly deafening. We also
enjoyed a massive drop in temperatures.
As a result, I managed to sleep until 7.
After breakfast, we all went our separate ways. Some students went to the famous Riesenrad in
the Prater Park (immortalized in Orson Welles’ The Third Man), while others went to the Zoo. I took three students and headed up to the
Belvedere Palace.
Built by Eugene of Savoy in the 17th century, the
upper and lower Belvederes now house a significant collection of Viennese
art. We made our way through stiff winds
and pouring rain to the upper Belvedere first.
This was definitely a day for staying indoors.
Like most museums, the Belvedere doesn’t like you taking
pictures, but this seems to just to make it more of a challenge. One of the students has a very nice
professional camera, but it’s rather large, and so as she walks, the guards in
each room basically followed her suspiciously (and deservedly). Her camera makes a distinct click, so it
really calls attention to what she’s doing.
I told her she needs to buy a silencer for it. When my cell phone is on mute, it doesn’t
make a sound at all. The two of us
competed for who could take the most photos without getting caught.
I mostly took photos of the paintings I particularly liked
or found particularly interesting. Of
course, I was limited by the placement of guards in the room.
Let’s start off with this Biedermeyer-era photo of a family
in mourning for the loss of their mother and his wife.
I also found this depiction of a British naval engagement to
be almost comical.
This painting is entitled “Caesar at the Rubicon.” Presumably the question is only will he cross
it to eat the sausages?
The order of the exhibition seemed a little confused, so at times we would go from 19th century academy art to Secession-era landscape painting like this:
and then back to baroque.
and this really amazing self-portrait by Joseph Floch:
I was also pleased they had a nice collection of Czech
cubist and radical paintings to make up a little for the closed museum we tried
to visit in Prague.
After lunch we headed down to the lower Belvedere where they
had two special exhibits. The first was
an amazing collection of Austrian symbolist works, which is a movement that
emerged in the latter half of the 19th century. Here’s how the museum describes it:
As early as the 1870s, Symbolism started to evolve from the spirit of décadence, which discovered for itself the cryptic aestheticism of decay and of the mystical and unfathomable. The Symbolist movement superseded the official style of Historicist painting, shifting its focus to the subjective perspective of psychological processes, which found expression in a suggestive language of colour and form. Its abandonment of banal reality led some artists to create idylls, while others invented cosmic visions. This new aestheticism, propagated by such artists as Max Klinger, Franz von Stuck, Fernand Khnopff, and Jan Toorop, was transmitted in Austria and Central Europe first and foremost via the Vienna Secession. In Austria, Rudolf Jettmar, Alfred Kubin, and Karl Mediz turned out to be among the most consistent exponents of Symbolism. Yet Symbolist ideas also played an important role for leading personalities of the avant-garde, including Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Koloman Moser.
Some of the paintings, like The Evil Mothers by Giovanni Sagantini,
were fascinating, though with two guards to a room, it was almost impossible to
sneak a shot. The only one got was of
the image used in the advertising for the exhibition: the Red
Angel
I will admit to one tiny moment of
silliness. There was one painting that
depicted a Frankenstein’s monster-like creature, with yellowish eyes, and hands
red with blood, lumbering through a snowy scene. I turned to one student and asked “wouldn’t
that go well in a child’s bedroom?”
The exhibition concluded with a
discussion of the Symbolist love of Wagner and Nietzsche’s critique of both.
After that we headed to see the special
exhibit of the work of Friedensreich Hundertwasser and his time in Japan in the
1950s. The exhibit explored the origins
of his rejection of straight lines and social conformity. It was quite interesting, but with so many
guards (what is it, the Austrian full employment program?), there was no way to
snap even a single shot.
We then returned to the pension, where
I ran several errands. The landlady
asked me to pay in cash so that required several bank visits to withdraw the
necessary amount. I paid the bill and
then went to the station to see about our train tickets to Budapest. Part of the rail line was damaged in the
flood so we have to change to a bus to get around it and then transfer to a
regional train line. I could have taken
a bus the whole way, but as I don’t know where to catch it or where in Budapest
it lets out I decided not to. Besides,
the regional train will let us off just a few blocks from our hotel.
The clerk at the train station also
thought that the damaged track would probably not affect our overnight train to
Warsaw, but I will check that out tomorrow night after we settle in.
For dinner, I took those students
interested to the city center. I wanted
to eat dinner at Café Hawelka, but they don’t have savory food. Instead, we went next door to the Reinthaler
Beisl, where I had some beef goulash and potatoes and sparkling apple
juice.
Then we went back to Café Hawelka for
dessert: Buchteln and coffee or hot chocolate.
Buchteln
are made out of a yeasty bread dough filled with prune lekvar, allowed to rise, and then baked. They are delicious, particularly fresh out of
the oven.
Afterwards, we returned to the
hotel. I made an accounting of my
expenses here in Vienna and now need to start to pack up.
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