Vienna: Art

Art is everywhere in Vienna, but we got our biggest doses (or perhaps just our most informed doses) at the Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Albertina. As promised, here are some views of the inside of Kunsthistorisches Museum:

It’s no surprise that the world’s largest collection of paintings by Bruegel are in this museum. They are right up the Hapsburg alley – incredibly busy and packed with content:

You could spend an hour looking at just one of these and probably still not take it all in. Or rather, you could if you could get close enough to see all that fine detail. There’s an electronic alarm that goes off if you lean in too close…. I was reduced to taking pictures of a section with my phone and zooming in. Bummer. But I suppose it makes sense; otherwise, we’d all be standing with our noses right up to the paintings … for a long time. The people behind us might get frustrated!

How did he even paint things that tiny? The Tower of Babel above is 114×155 cm (45×61 in). That sounds pretty large – until you see the actual size of these teeny-tiny figures.

A fellow museum visitor told M that a version of the Massacre of the Innocents in Britain had been altered to protect the delicate sensibilities of the viewers by removing all the dead/dying children. (See it here.) Seriously? They had public executions but a painting would be too much?

A special exhibit showcased the paintings of Michaelina Wautier, the most renowned of the very few female painters working in the 1600s. She definitely had a different viewpoint than male painters of the time. Here, her paintings of the five senses:

It was apparently even rarer for female painters to include themselves in their paintings, as she did in this one:

But so many things seem odd. She looks like she was dropped in from some other painting, with different lighting and a different palate. And what is she telling us with that creepy-looking guy’s hand curling on her neck? She almost looks like she would fit better in the painting below, though her state of undress might be taken as unsaintly.

Besides these two “big names”, we saw many, many other things (and big names). Below are a few of the highlights for me.

The old woman’s face appealed to me in this one…and the story. Two gods in disguise go to a village and only the two poorest villagers will host them. The gods let everyone else sink into a bog. There’s a moral for you!

In the antiquities section, the fragments of statues made me think how such fragments have somehow become an art form of their own. Do any of today’s sculptors ever replicate that? (And perhaps the one on the right is saying, “Come back here and I’ll bite your ankles!”)

At the Albertina, an exhibit showcased the sketches and watercolors a group of friends made as they sat around and socialized in cafés. Many of the caricatures were entertaining. Seeing them made both M and me say we need to spend more time sketching.

It’s always fun to come across paintings of places we’ve been. In an exhibit at the Albertina, Monet to Picasso, we saw two: Collioure and Douarnanez.

André Derain’s Collioure (1905) and ours (2022):

Renoir’s Douarnanez was a little more colorful than ours…

But it wasn’t all old stuff. At the Albertina there was also an exhibit by a modern artist, Brigitte Kowanz, working with light.

In one, she wanted to make the fairly abstract idea of the speed of light more real. So the nerdiest thing we saw was this:

0.000000013342563 = the time in seconds for the light to travel from one end of this 4-meter long piece to the other. I don’t know, still seems kind of abstract. That’s a mighty small number.

But we can’t leave Vienna without a little more over-the-top decorating…. So here’s bonus content of the National Library in the Hofburg:

Tall books on the bottom, short ones on top – as if the ceilings weren’t high enough already without the extra trompe l’oeil. And hidden behind the books – more books! They didn’t design the library to put all the books on display, because, duh, there wouldn’t have been enough space for ornamentation!