On Sunday, we planned to visit both Albertina and at least some of the Hofburg museums, but we ended up spending the whole afternoon in Albertina (including lunch, which took longer than we expected for a museum cafe).
We started with the State Rooms exhibit, then moved on to Monet to Picasso and Fascination Paper.
The State Rooms display a very interesting collection of drawings (independent of a separate exhibit)
Several very interesting Dürer drawings:
Monet to Picasso Exhibit.
That was a giganic exhibit, and I loved it, expecially because many of the paintings of the well known painters were sort of unexpected. I approached each of the works with the thought: do I know the artist? In in about half of the cases I didn’t guess correctly.
Last time I was in Vienna, I learned about how much it contributed to the Modernism, and this time, I continued to explore the artists whom I didn’t know before or didn’t know enough.
Jawlensky was one of the founders of the Blue Rider group. Here is what is said about this group in the exhibit:
For a few years, Munich became the centre of German avant-garde art in the early twentieth century. The Blave Reiter (Blue Rider) association of artists was founded there by Vasily Kandinsky and Franz Marc in 1911. Further members included Alexei von Jawlensky, August Macke, Gabriele Münter, Paul Klee, Marianne von Werefkin, and Lyonel Feininger. Next to the Brücke (Bridge) group of artists formed in Dresden in 1905, the Blave Reiter is the most important innovative movement in twentieth-century Germany. It helped to lay the foundations for Expressionism and profoundly revolutionized art.
The name derives from Marc’s fascination with the romantic, mystical quality of the colour blue and Kandinsky’s fondness for the mythic figure of the horseman. The group’s artists aimed at forging an abstract bridge between pure colours and non-representational forms derived from the model of nature through gradual reduction.
The Blue Rider artists’ choice of non-natural colours is owed to the influence of Matisse and Fauvism.
BTW, Fauvism is another new thing I learned during this visit: I didn’t know that this was a separate artistic movement.
More from this group:
And one more quote from the exhibition description, one more movement I learned about: New Objectivity.
Next to the continuation of Oskar Kokoschka’s painterly expressionism, a contrary movement established itself in Austria in the 1920s: New Objectivity. Its name derives from the legendary eponymous exposition of post-expressionist art in Mannheim in 1925. The paintings are characterized by clarity and precision. The movement’s followers aimed af rendering reality in an objective manner with great sobriety. Formally, they harked back to the Renaissance period and masters like Albrecht Dürer. They not only rediscovered the intricate glazing technique that was to conceai the individual brushstroke but also strove to emulate the iconographic models of Old German painting. The variety of solutions brought forth by the New Objectivity movement in Austria was greater than that in other European countries.
In Austria, New Objectivity was dominated by two movements: Franz Sedlacek’s magic realism and Rudolf Wacker’s matter-of-fact representation of reality. Sedlacek worked as a curator at Vienna’s Museum of Technology. Peopled with uncanny figures, his fantastic sceneries are informed by late Gothic painting and the world landscapes of the early sixteenth-century Danube School.
Influenced by south German painting, the Vorarlberg artist Rudolf Wacker arranged the trivial objects of his studio, stuffed animals and cacti, masks and dolls, to strange still lifes rendered in an old-masterly style. Thus, New Objectivity came to develop a pictorial language of its own in which lifeless and isolated objects were executed in frompe l’oeil.
The artist Herbert Reyi-Honisch was primarily concerned with representing nostalgic landscapes of the soul. His Big Part does not confront the viewer with a really existing town but with an ideal notion of peace ond prosperity transformed into a toy scenery at a time of actual economic decline and the threat of the German Reich.
I am putting a hard stop here because I didn’t cover even half of what I saw and wanted to talk about, and this post is already super long. To be continued 🙂
Hettie's Reflections 