Leopold

Today we met up with Dr. O for our last tour with her, this one was at the Leopold Museum. In this exhibit, we focused mostly on Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. The Leopold Museum is a collection that is completely the Leopold family’s, they have been collecting since the 1950s. The specialization on of the museum is Viennese artwork and sculptures. First we started off with Gustav Klimt, who was born in the 1860s and was the main purveyor of Art Nouveau. After going to a couple exhibits of Gustav Klimt, we really had it beat into our heads that he was the father of 18 illegitimate children and that he had syphilis. That and the fact that Eugene of Savoy being “extremely gay” will definitely be two facts that I will never forget from this trip. Early on in Klimt’s career, he was a Ringstrasse artist, but after his little incident with the Vienna University where his paintings were refused by the department heads, he was the first president of the Secession movement. One of Gustav Klimt’s paintings that we looked at the most was his “Life and Death,” which depicts a very deathly looking figure with a skull for a head looking ominously over a bunch of figures of life. There is a sense of two worlds, and the figure of death is really staring down life and it made Dr. O remark that the figures of life are almost expecting death as imminent fate, even the woman holding the child understands. The Gustav Klimt exhibit, especially the Life and Death painting, transitions into the Egon Schiele exhibit very nicely, because his style is much harsher and sadder than that of Klimt in my opinion. The Egon Schiele paintings were much darker, even his own self portrait was very dark, and it immediately makes you think that this guy is crazy. It is interesting to note that the Leopold’s bought most of these Egon Schiele paintings when he was still not that famous. Another interesting fact is that the life of Egon Schiele was greatly impacted by Gustav Klimt, at the turn of the 20^th century, Klimt had already turned out a few paintings which are now worth millions of dollars, but in 1907, Klimt becomes aware of Schiele’s talent and then in 1909, he gets him to be part of the national art show in Vienna in the month of May. This is huge for Schiele, because before Klimt’s recognition, he was just another painter at the art academy, but now he was making a name for himself, even if it was in the shadow of Klimt. Schiele has one of the most interesting stories when it comes to the Spanish Flu, because eight years before he died, he painted a picture called the Dead Mother. This picture foreshadows the death of his wife from the Spanish Flu and then a few days later, he falls victim to the same fate. This being the last art museum that I was to see on this trip I was very amused to notice that I was gaining a sort of recognition and respect for these great artists, especially the more obscure ones like Schiele. They are just as powerful as other paintings, yet they lack the name to get them far in places, except now, Schiele is a top noch painter in the minds of art enthusiasts the world over.