Vienna 3: Belvedere Palace, Hans Makart, the Reisenrad

Hans Makart, in Renaissance costume, on his horse, for the Imperial procession in April 1879

So, my last day in Vienna today, and it has been pissing down for most of it, so, having trudged around extensively in the last couple of days, I've been have a quiet day of it. Sundays still seem to be Sundays in Mitteleuropa. Zürich was almost entirely closed last weekend, and it seems to be the same here. It's quite a nice change from the UK, where the largely imaginary needs of consumers to have an available portfolio of retail opportunities at 0230 hrs on a Monday morning, just in case they've run out of toothpaste, bleach, or socks, are wearingly ubiquitous.

The Belvedere Palace

On Thursday I ended up going to the Belvedere Palace. Formerly the home of Prince Eugen of Savoy, an eighteenth century aristocrat, military commander and politician, it really is quite ludicrously opulent and grandiose. These days, the gigantic complex, featuring Upper and Lower Palaces, vast ornamental garden, stable and orangery, is an art gallery; the upper complex treads over the same story told at the Leopold Museum in the Museum Quarter, and features the biggest collection of Gustav Klimt anywhere in the world. Famous pieces include The Kiss and Judith & Holofernes, which face one another in the same room, in a mesmerising display. The Upper Palace also contains work from medieval times, and Austrian painting and sculpture from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 

However, it was the exhibition in the Lower Belvedere that really stuck with me. All around the city there are posters for two exhibitions of Hans Makart; The Painter of the Senses in the Lower Belvedere, and The Artist Rules the City at the Kunstlerhaus just off Karlsplatz. Certainly, Makart, is receiving the kind of exposure in Vienna currently that he hasn't had since his early death in 1884. Imagine a motorway pile-up involving Augustus John's personality. Lord Leighton's subject matter and John Singer Sargent's appeal as a society portraitist, and you're somewhere close to Makart. He enjoyed the personal favour of Emperor Franz Josef, who built him a house and studio in a city park, and who gave him academic appointments and commissions. Makart had a considerable following amongst minor aristocracy, the theatre and the moneyed petty bourgeois. His wide appeal didn't always find him favour amongst fellow painters; Anselm Feuerbach, the history painter, groused in 1873 that "This diaherretic production in his Asiatic junk shop displeases me, and will go out of fashion".

Hans Makart, Abundantia: The Gifts of the Earth 1870

Perhaps it was Makart's disinterest in historical exactitude that displeased the chilly and austere Feuerbach. Makart was little interested in detail, more in the overall impression; he paid particular attention to costume, dramatic staging and architecture. His paintings were regularly monumental in scale and ambition, even if that ambition wasn't always quite realised. The huge canvas Venice Greets Caterina Cornaro of 1872 is like a Busby Berkeley set frozen in time, but the sheer richness of the detail and the dense clusters of figures prevent it from being appreciated as a whole.

Makart has nothing like the profile in the English speaking art world as he does in Austria and Germany. In the UK, he is little known, other than as a teacher of Klimt, and the late works on display in the Kunstlerhaus show a series of paintings based on Wagners Ring Cycle which show flashes of what was to become known as the Secession style more than a decade after Makart's death.

However, his greatest ever triumph was not a single painting but a vast, ornate series, related to a commission to produce a paegant to celebrate the Silver Wedding anniversary of the Imperial couple in 1879. Typically modestly, Makart chose a Renaissance theme, working closely with local theatres and trades guilds; the eventual procession involved 14,000 people, paintings, sculptures, costumes, even live camels. Watched in Vienna by nearly 300,000 people, it was a gigantic spectacle simply unprecedented for the time. Makart led the charge himself, posing in full sub-Henry VIII style costume aboard a white charger.

Such was the enormity of his impact on the era that "Makart style" related not only to painting but also to the heavily cluttered, heavily draped, mock-Renaissance furnished interiors of the time. Sadly, a mere five years after the great success of this display, Makart was dead, a result of the combination of syphilis, hard living and neglect of his health. As is always the case, the "Makart style" was horrifically out of fashion within fifteen years of his demise, with his legacy further complicated by the personal approval of Hitler (Hitler variously bought/nicked Makarts from the later 1930s and there is a rather ghastly photo of the dictator presenting Hermann Goering with a Makart for his birthday, in 1939). As a result, Makart's work stayed largely undiscussed until the later 1970s, when peope began to look again seriously at his painting and the era which produced it.

Aleksandr Vinogradov & Vladimir Dubossarsky, Cosmonaut 1, 2006

Elsewhere, I managed to get around a couple of contemporary shows; a rather over-curated and slight group show about the relationship between Art & the Space Race at the Kunsthalle; some decent work, none more so than Jane and Louise Wilson's Dreamland video of 2001, but overall the work is forced into several rather unnecessary, artificial and seemingly arbitrary categories by the exhibition organisers. A much better show was to be found in the basement of the Kunstlerhaus, which carefully examined the relationship between art production and institutions, featuring the work of nearly 100 contemporary artists from every corner of the globe.

Art & Institution, Kunstlerhaus

I also managed to fit in a trip on the famous Reisenrad- Ferris Wheel- in the Praterstern amusement park. This has been a feature of the Viennese skyline since 1897, built by the same English engineer that built similar wheels in London & Blackpool. It's also best known for its role in The Third Man (1949) and more recently in contemporary fiction, such as Simon Mawer's The Glass Room (2009), set between Brno and Vienna. It is an amazing sight, dominating an otherwise noisy amusement park filled with the usual waltzer rides and general tat. It takes about fifteen minutes to wheeze its way around one revolution, and the views from the very top are incredibly clear.

Reisenrad from the ground

Vienna Looking East from the Reisenrad

So, tomorrow I leave this city having really enjoyed it, but knowing that I've barely scratched the surface other than in terms of museums/galleries. Most of the contemporary galleries are on holiday in August; also, the MUMOK contemporary museum is undergoing renovation and won;t be open again until the end of September. So, I'll be spending a few more days here on the way back home, trying to catch up with the things I've not yet managed to see, and hopefully meeting one or two art historians in relation to my book.

Anyway, it's off to Brno and then the Czech countryside for a few days this week, ten next week beginning to drift towards Slovenia, via a couple of as-yet-to-be-finalised places. I still have a couple of weeks of holiday left yet before I have to start really focusing on my research stuff out here.

Vienna: Leopold Museum

Josef Maria Olbrich, Vienna Secession building, 1897

What a city Vienna is. Having spent two days tramping around taking photos of pretty much everything, and marinading in the atmosphere of this old imperial capital, I can safely say that it has far exceeded my expectations.

Vienna must be the best preserved memorial to a state that no longer exists. It's nearly 100 years since the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire, yet, wandering around the Heldenplatz and the old Imperial residence, its existence seems as recent as that of the Soviet Union, or Yugoslavia. There's a faint tang of horse piss around the city centre, much as there would have been a century ago; little Pinzgauer horses ferry cartloads of snapping tourists about the preserved relics, with the same look of pliant boredom on their faces as can be seen on a Blackpool donkey. Most postcard stands have postcards of the Emperor Franz Josef and his wife; maps of the old Imperial territories with their long-forgotten coats of arms; and, sepia photos of Alt Wien.

A guy dressed entirely as Mozart and painted gold for good measure, was whistling his way through the composer's entire oeuvre yesterday, earning a few Euros; he was chirruping his way through the Häffner as I passed him by. Another gold painted figure, this time some sort of late eighteenth century gentleman I think, was uttering bizarre deep bass noises, and generating widespread indifference, on the Kartner Platz. A lieder singer and opera tenor, Schubert versus Puccini, operated just out of one another's earshot on the same street (any closer, and Vienna's answer to 8 Mile would have been an absolute aural shuttlecrash).

Stephanskirche at dusk

The atmosphere here is very laid back. It's a cliche to say that nobody is in a hurry in Vienna, but the deep sense of history here, and the thorough immersion in European culture, doesn't seem to affect the locals one bit. There is no nostalgia for the past; just a sense of "well this all happened here once, I suppose you can't quite believe it, neither can we, but ...*shrug*". Vienna's easy charm matches Berlin in terms of ambience, without the arrogance / rudeness / stressed tail-chasing that normally characterises other capitals.

Yesterday, I spent nearly four hours in the Leopold Museum. Many of the Vienna museums are grouped together in the ambitious Museums Quarter, which is one of the largest cultural concentrations anywhere in the world. At least four major art museums, with further spaces for design, architecture and film, what looks to be one of the best art book shops I've come across anywhere, and a huge open air space dotted with brightly coloured furniture for some sunbathing (it was 27 degrees yesterday here), sprawl across 60,000 square meters in the city centre. I had initially gone yesterday expecting to do the Leopold and the Kunsthalle, but in the end the sheer depth and richness of the Leopold collection detained me much longer than anticipated.

Egon Schiele, Self-Portrait with Lowered Eyes, 1912. Leopold Museum, Vienna

First things first, the Leopold has the world's biggest collection of Egon Schiele paintings. Even with the ground floor under partial renovation, there were still two good-sized rooms filled with some remarkable examples of his work from all stages of his too-short career; the lowering, defiant stare in the self-portrait above, plus a landscape filled with ravens, stick in the mind. There were two further major exhibitions from the permanent collection upstairs; one floor, by far the busiest, told the familiar story of the Vienna Secession and the Wiener Werkstatte. It actually was wonderful to see many of these paintings with fresh eyes. I've seen Klimt's "The Kiss" and Schiele's female nudes on so many student poster sales, on so many stippled magnolia walls, manipulated towards advertising so many club nights/parties, that it became hard not to be cynical.

This, of course, all derived from an explosion in interest in the Vienna secession in the English speaking world from the late seventies onwards, stimulated in part by the writings of Carl E. Schorske and Peter Vergo, and, as the eighties developed, the spreading of interest in Jugendstil/Art Nouveau parallels elsewhere on the continent. Those who remember the inescapable ubiquity of Rennie Mackintosh style in late 1980s Glasgow will know what I mean.

However, being up close and being able to spend a long time in front of these images really breaks the old weary familiarity apart. Schiele's style veers erratically from sensuality and hedonism to flayed, raw, painful introspection. It seems very spare and pared down, compared to the decorative eroticism of Klimt. Upstairs, there is a rare sight; two lost Klimt canvases (the scandalous friezes for Vienna university that provoked a period of exile after 1903), at full dimensions, are displayed in black and white. Of course, the originals were amongst the last casualties of the Waffen-SS in May 1945, being burned at the Austrian castle where they had been held for safekeeping. The ghostly presence of the images, fully sized, is an unusual and poignant feature.

The Leopold is also key to answering the oft-asked question, "What happened to the Vienna art scene after 1918?" The death of four major figures- Klimt, Schiele, Moser and the architect Wagner in the same year would have been severe in a country at piece; couple that with the defeat of Austria-Hungary and its rapid dissolution, and you have an unprecedented cataclysm. This is dealt with in one large room on the top floor, bringing home the impact of these losses very effectively. Two large scale canvases, by Albin Egger-Lienz, hanging on adjacent walls- Danse Macabre and Finale underline his deep sense of futility and loss.

Albin Egger-Lienz, Danse Macabre, 1915

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Albin Egger-Lienz, Finale, 1918

After the war, Austrian artists experimented with various kinds of post-Cubism, abstraction, and a hone grown version of Neue Sachlichkeit. Unlike the politically charged grotesque of the German version, Austrian new objectivity veered towards an intensity of vision and an interest in what has become known as "magic realism". I had not come across many of the painters in this section of the show- names such as Greta Friest, Rudolf Wacker, Alfred Wickenburg, and the like. there was more than enough good painting here to dispel the myth in the Anglophone art world, that nothing much happened in Austrian art in between the deaths of Klimt and Schiele, and the Viennese Actionists in the 1960s.

Hanns (Jean) Kralik, Aus meinem Fester 1930

 I'll write more later, it's time for the Kunsthalle and I don't want this post to develop into one of thesis length.