Leopold Museum

       Sometimes I think Vienna is almost prettier at night... (Almost.) --->

      Friday afternoon (turned into evening) was spent at the Leopold Museum. I've truly never seen any museum like it. It was a very eclectic collection of art--all pieces that evoked an EXTREME emotional reaction. The deeper you descended into the museum, the darker the art got it seemed. The art on first floor below ground level, was fascinated with death and depression, while even more disturbing images and collections were on the floor below that. I was very moved by those rooms, but felt too uncomfortable to takepictures of those rooms.....(if blood makes you feel faint, the Leopold Museum is NOT for you!) There were lots of staged photographs of torture, naked bodies, blood, and defiled dead bodies. I felt almost sick to my stomach. Therefore, NO PICTURES! No one told me what I was getting into when I went to the Leopold Museum!! But I'm glad I went. It was a very intense experience.

      But I did take some neat pictures of some other cool pieces of art. (Thankfully there were 3 floors ABOVE ground level, including a Gustav Klimt exhibit, that were a little less morbid.)

       I really liked this one on the right--the artist cut out the figures of many different pictures of models from magazines to make them all uniformly blank--commenting on the banality of the fashion industry. Very cool!





        Now this last painting down here was very interesting because of the history behind it! I'm going to summarize it poorly, but essentially: the composer, Arnold Schoenberg, was also a painter on the side. A young painter, Gerstl, who admired him greatly, painted his portrait and the two became friends. Gerstl was able to enter into Schonberg's friend circle and the families became close and vacationed together. However, (tough times ahead) Gerstl had an affair with Schoenberg's unhappy wife, Mathilde, who felt isolated and unloved because Schoenberg was so committed to his composing. This is one of several portraits that Gerstl painted of Mathilde. Sehr scandalös!! Basically Gerstl broke up the marriage and Mathilde ran away with him for a bit. (Until Webern convinced her to return back to her family and assuage the social scandal her forbidden romance created!) So funny. Wagner definitely had a lover named Mathilde too. And she wrote him love poems that he set to music and used as "studies" for Tristan und Isolde...These women!