Albertina

The Albertina is the best museum in Vienna, hands down. Today we decided to visit one of the only museums not required for class, the Albertina. In 1794 Emperor Franz II gave the palace as a gift to Prince Albert of Saxony (Duke of Teschen), the son in law of Maria Theresia, married to her eldest daughter Maria Christina.

It was extended and rebuilt several times to accommodate changing styles, including the building of the Habsburg statesrooms. These apartments were used as guest corridors when needed, with the Spanish room, built by Albert's heir and nephew Friedrich, being the only lodging for the Spanish Habsburgs outside of Spain. These rooms were emptied and damaged by the bombing in World War II, but recent renovations and conservation efforts have restored the rooms, complete with period pieces and tapestries.

Duke Albert was an avid arts collector and patron, and amassed a large personal collection, serving the higher purposes of 'education and the power of morality.' When the palace and staterooms where acquired by the Republic of Austria in 1919, more artwork of the Habsburgs was brought in, creating the current collection within the gallery today. However, since it is one of the largest collections of graphic and modern art, only small portions of its collection are shown to the public.

Pictures were only allowed in the staterooms, a practice I find unnecessary and pretentious since most Viennese museums do allow pictures, but the books in the gift shop had every piece within their collection showcased, so I didn't mind too much.

The staterooms were beautiful, housing sketches by Michaelangelo and paintings by Durer. However, the unique and grand architecture and design of the rooms was more impressive than the paintings the rooms contained. There was a rococo room, suited from ceiling to floor in yellow, the spanish rooms dressed in red velvet, the wedgwood room with blue and white wedgwood covering the walls, and so many more. Each room's theme was distinct and evident; there was even a grand ballroom with Greek statues framing each large window and mirror. The pastel watercolors and light marble walls and columns all gave off a sense of air and light, reflecting and continuing throughout the entirety of the museum.

The permanent collection went in order in terms of artistic styles throughout the period of modernity. The first room contained works by impressionists, neoimpressionists, and post-impressionists, such as Monet, Renior, Cezanne, Manet, and Van Gogh. These artists used color and movement to portray emotion and to convey a particular mood, with visible brush strokes and copious numbers of landscapes. The individual strokes aimed at catching the true qualities of an image or landscape, attempting at embracing realism. The neoimpressionist movement, especially, was highlighted in the gallery. Neoimpressionism was founded by George Seurat with contributions by Paul Signac, using the techniques of both pointillism (using small dots to form an image) and divisionism (using single dots of color to interact optically).

The next room contained works by the "fauvists," translated as wild beasts. This style grew out of Signac's pointillism, Cezanne's impressionism, and Van Gogh's post-impressionism, but was short lived, lasting only three years. The major artists showcased from this period at the Albertina were Henri Matisse and Andre Derain.

The expressionists were next, more radical and sexually provocative than the fauvists. These expressionists belonged to the German group Die Brucke, wishing to convey an inward experience of the world. Works by Nolde and Pechstein were showcased in the gallery. Another group closely associated to the expressionist movement was Der Blaue Reiter, a German group of artists from Munich, among them Paul Klee and Lyonel Feininger. This group was inspired by orphism (abstract uses of bright color) and cubism.

As a side note, we were talking in class recently about Arnold Schoenberg and how he was an Austrian composer associated with modernism and expressionism. His classical compositions do have a logic to them much like expressionistic art, and one can tell that he hears the logic and hears a magic that is not readily heard by everyone else in his music. For me, I don't mind his music, but I also don't prefer it over other classical composers. It seems like it should match a film score or a silent film more than it suits an orchestra and its audience.

The Russian Avant Garde room followed, in which Marc Chagal's works were the most prominent. Chagal's vivid and colorful paintings in turn anticipated (both historically and literally) the surrealism presented in the next room. Works by Joan Miro, Max Ernst, and Rene Magritte were all showcased, mixing the unreal with the real. The last few rooms contained paintings and works of the cubists, such as Picasso, who took particular aspects of an image and reinterpreted (or analyzed) them. Later in the cubist movement, these separated aspects of an image were again reunited in the manner of a collage-style painting.

The museum as a whole was absolutely astounding. The major works in the permanent collection are a recent acquisition by the museum, given over by the Batliner family who are avid art collectors.

Today's German Word:

Moglich - 'possible'