Viennese Art

Apr 27, 2004

Of course we went to art museums in Vienna, though only two of the many: the Belvedere and the Kunsthistorisches Museum. The Belvedere is renowned for its collections of Klimt and Schiele. Which were interesting, but left me wondering: didn't these guys know any happy or attractive people? I could understand a resistance to cliché prettiness, if that's what it was, but Klimt seems to have gone out of his way to make his subjects look emaciated and grimacing.

Schiele's subjects mostly look unhappy; the only smiling face I saw was of "the Rainer boy," whose real mouth could not possibly have been that weird cupid's bow shape. I liked the boy, and especially the pearly shine of the background in that and other Schiele works, which unfortunately don't show up in photo reproductions.

There were some fun pictures at the Belvedere by Josef Danhauser: sly, sarcastic commentaries on the morals and manners of his day. One large canvas shows the aftermath of a chess game that has just been won by an attractive young woman, against a much older man, who recoils in shock. They are surrounded by many figures: the old man's wife, who leans wearily on the back of his chair, as if she has had to sit through far too many chess games; various admirers of the winner; several disapproving women; and, in the background, a slyly amused old man. This same man appears in "The Reading of the Testament," in which a well-to-do family is evidently much shocked by the deceased having left all or most of his fortune to a poor, shy young lady, who seems as surprised as they are. In that picture, the old man, presumably the dear departed, looks on sardonically from a portrait-within-a-portrait in the background.

There was also a huge, voluptuous canvas by Hans Makart of the "Triumph of Ariadne," teeming with sprawling, drunken, half-naked figures. The humor lay in its juxtaposition with a portrait of a soberly-dressed, staid old lady, frowning in disapproval at the goings-on next door.