Vienna, Day 3

On Monday, we split up at the train station. The boys headed one direction to the Museum of Military History (and then the Museum of Torture!) and I went another to the Belvedere Palace to see the Klimt paintings.

I showed the view from the gardens the night we arrived in Vienna, but here is how the front looks over the reflecting pond.

And here's the imposing front gate. The Belvedere Palace was built by Prince Eugene of Savoy. Evidently the Prince was short and not too handsome, but extremely intellectual. He was denied a military appointment by Louis XVI in his native France, but applied with the Habsburg Monarchy and rose to the top position of War Minister very quickly. The Upper Belevedere was the showplace for entertaining, while the Lower Belveder was where he actually lived during summers.

The Upper Belvedere currently houses the largest collection of Klimt paintings anywhere, including The Kiss, his most well known (see the link for larger photos). It is definitely better to see in real life, where the dimensionality of the paint and shifting colors depending on the angle of view are a vital part of the painting. One of the details I most enjoyed about some of the paintings were the frames, which Klimt designed himself and had built by his brother who was a goldsmith. They have echoing motifs and lettering. Somehow in photographs, I've found this to be totally ignorable.

The painting called Judith is a good example of the detailed frame. I also found that I had always focused on the woman and ignored the head in the lower right. The painting illustrates the Bible story of Judith, a Jewish woman who seduces the enemy commander and decapitates him. I also enjoyed his landscapes, views of a yellow palace through trees, which reminded me of the yellow of the Schoenbrunn Palace.

The Belvedere had other interesting paintings in their collection, including Monets and a Van Gogh, but the Klimts were by far the most popular. I had a quick lunch of asparagus pasta in the Palace Cafe (it's asparagus season here and I've eaten it everywhere we've gone), and decided to continue my Klimt odyssey at another museum, the Leopold, in the town center.

Another famous Klimt painting, Death and Life, hangs in the Leopold Museum, along with photos of the original painting as it was exhibited in the early 1900s, before he reworked it, adding more detail to both Life and Death and changing the background color completely.

I wasn't familiar with the faculty paintings scandal. Klimt was commissioned to make a series of paintings for the ceiling of the Great Hall at the University of Vienna. They were attacked as pornography and never installed in the building. Klimt bought them back, and during WWII they were removed to a palace in southern Austria for safekeeping, but were destroyed by a fire the day before the war ended. Only black and white photographs of them exist. The museum had full size prints of them mounted for the first time, and they are quite imposing and powerful. Above is Medicine, scandalous for its inclusion of a pregnant woman and an old woman next to a skeleton (death).

A huge collection of Egon Schiele paintings was also on exhibit (I saw more at the Belvedere), and I was quite taken with his landscapes. Most interesting were photographs from which he excerpted the building bones and his sketches displayed alongside.

Also at the Leopold was an Art Nouveau jewelry exhibit, with incredible pieces like this jeweled and enameled belt clasp and pieces by Lalique and Faberge.

When I finally met back up with the guys, we walked to a local Mediteranean restaurant through the neighborhood filled with embassies to eat antipasto, pasta and fish. Dessert was best. Joren and I ate the "chocolate parfait" which amounted to frozen chocolate mousse inside a chocolate cone, upside down on thin wafers of pineapple with passion fruit seeds. Keenan had strawberry tiramisu, all to himself as he has a cold we don't want to catch.