Lange Nacht der Museen

One thing I had been looking forward to ever since I knew for sure I was going to be in Vienna in October was getting another crack at the long night of the museums. For €13 you get entry to as many museums as you wish to enter between the hours of 6pm and 1am. You are unlikely to run out, over 100 museums take part in Vienna alone and 660+ in all of Austria.

There are many approaches to be taken with such an opportunity. Some hold that you should go to the most ludicrous museums possible, safe in the knowledge that if the snow globe museum isn't very good then you didn't lose out. Others use it as an excuse to try and rack up the most money saved, visiting the big Vienna museums for the price of entry to one. Whichever strategy one chooses, a prospective 7 hours of museum viewing does require a strategy. If you think about it, that's about as many hours on your feet as a pretty reasonable day hike, and you wouldn't just wander off into the hills without a plan, would you? Oh alright you probably would, but this is MUSEUMS we're talking about.

This year I went for a slightly more focussed approach than my first year, as I have already been to a number of the bigger museums several times, and I have had the luxury of time to work out what I have missed out on. I started by going to the museum literally 2 minues walk from my flat, because it felt rude not to. It is the Austrian Museum of 'Volkskunde' which literally translates as folklore but really it is a museum of austrian ethnology sort of thing. Ie they study what people were like in the past and how attitudes change, from what they wrote and what they made, ate off, read, played, etc. It was a cool spin on a normal museum, as I don't tend to think about what objects in museums are telling me about how popular attitudes and prejudices changed. One forgets that people from the past were just as susceptible to misinformation and misplaced countryside nostalgia as anyone is today...

THEN I went to the Austrian National Bank (10 minutes from my house) for a brief but entertaining visit where I saw a €100,000 coin and lifted a 12.5kg / €500,000 gold bar. Cool! I made an aborted attempt to check out a telescope which was too overcrowded, and then by way of a classic tram that was out for the night, made my way back towards the heart of Museum-Vienna. I have always wanted to go into the Secession building, a beautiful piece of Jugendstil architecture, but I've never felt that the size was worth the price, especially seeing how likely it was to contain incomprehensible conceptual art. Well, it did, but it also contains the greatest piece by Gustav Klimt I've ever seen. The beethoven frieze wasn't even ever supposed to be anything but a decoration for an exhibition, but the figures in it are beautiful, the (to me) normally strange gold-and-pattern colour scheme of Klimt works really well here, and all the mythological creatures/demons/temptations etc are brilliantly done. I'd probably pay full price just to go stare at it again!

Continuing the theme of hellish creatures, I met up with Ash and I directed him to the picture gallery of the academy of visual arts to see the epic Heironymus Bosch masterpiece, the Last Judgement Triptych. I do not use epic unadvisedly. It is three panels, one of eden, one of earth ending in fire, and one of hell. The backgrounds of fiery black mountains stretch infinitely into the distance, in the skies above heaven the angels are duelling, and everywhere genuinely horrific, twisted but faintly comic creatures or ex-humans are crawling out of, through or around things as people are trapped in spiked cages or simply swallowed up by the ground. Basically, if I were a 15th century peasant and I saw it, I would go to church every day for the rest of my life. AMAZING.

So many hours in museum mode can be tiring, so we dropped in to the Heldenplatz and bought huge Krapfen. Which have a silly name if you're english but actually they are Austria's version of filled doughnuts. And instead of those ones you get in Tesco which are over-sugary doughy rubbish, these were light, sweet, satisfying apricot jam filled pieces of genius. So good I sort of didn't regret not buying a langos...

Finally we headed over to the Leopoldsmuseum to take in their huge exhibition of Egon Schiele paintings (After I forced a 15 minute detour to see the ever wonderful meteorite room in the natural history museum..). Egon Schiele was a genius expressionist painter, but his paintings and drawings of humans distorted into gangly, ungainly caricatures of the traditional artist's nude are not what one would call relaxing. The amount of awkwardness he can portray in his truly unique style, with pose as much as colour and his jittery but somhow still purposeful lines is admirable from an art point of view, but you aren't ever going to put him on your wall. There was also a nice selection of other german expressionists too though, so it wasn't all tortured nude people.

And with that my feet nearly fell of and I limped home, having thoroughly though only temporarily sated my culture-lust.

Tune in sometime soon for a brief account of how the next day I decided to rest my feet by going for a hike in the Wienerwald!

Der Tom.

PS some photos in the usual place.