A visit to the Leopold Museum

by OLGS, guest blogger.

It is hot in Vienna today. DomTran and I spent as much of the day as possible out of the heat in the air-conditioned galleries of the Leopold Museum, located in the Museum Quarter, near the old Hofburg Palace grounds. I mistakenly thought the museum was named for some Leopold Hapsburg king or prince or other, but instead, it is named for a Dr. Leopold, a Vienna eye-doctor who collected 20th century Austrian Art. The permanent collection is especially strong in the work of the impressionist painter Egon Schiele. His works in his early 20s, between 1910 and 1914, included a number of haunting self-portraits, including the one above. He died of the Spanish flu in 1918, just a few days after his wife (and model) died of the same epidemic. His last act as an artist was to sketch a portait of his wife as she lay dying. His last act as a human being was to ask a photographer friend to take his portrait as he expired. That's it below, the artist dead at just age 28.






A more cheery traveling exhibit is some Jugendstihl works by the artist Josef Maria Auchentaller. He was Austrian-born but moved to Munich in the 1890s to join the "Jugend" magazine group. He returned to Vienna and joined the "Secession" group and helped edit their magazine. He and his wife took up another line of work, hotel-keeping, on the Adriatic coast after 1904 and the poster shown below literally promoted his family business. He and his wife Emma were chased out of Italy after that country and Austria-Hungary went to war in 1915, but after the peace, they returned to the Italian coast and resumed their hotel business until World War II. He died in his bed, unphotographed, at age 84.




Tonight, we plan to go see "Bruno" the film, thinking we might as well see it for its Vienna scenes and listen for how the locals react. Details tomorrow.