A vision of painting in Vienna

Some notes on Monet, Cezanne, Gauguin, Klimt, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir

We inherit from ancient Greek the word museum, which comes from the Muses, divinities that seem to make visible the invisible, the soul, in those activities that don’t seem to be quite under our control, but are somehow inspired, which is proved by the fact that the making of beautiful things is not given to everyone & even those few who can do it are not able to do it very reliably. These are the activities that give an account of who we are, what our way of life is, they give completeness to our otherwise partial grasp of human affairs. Memory is the divine mother of the Muses of playing the lyre, epic poetry, history & many other things besides. The soul, Aristotle says, is somehow all things. This includes everything beyond human affairs, yet when we look at the world, we want to understand where we fit in it.

Of course, when we talk of museums, this is not quite what we have in mind; warehousing & exhibiting is more like it. This is more than a little strange—museums were built in the age of Enlightenment to elevate people, to educate their taste, to give a vision of the greatness & perhaps the Progress of mankind. Museums were supposed to be temples of culture. Museums were a rare attempt to make peace between the aristocrats whose taste & wealth had governed the imitative arts, but at the expense of the majority, & the democracies coming into possession of, well, almost everything, but without much of an idea of what’s worthwhile. Museums allowed the bourgeois to substitute creativity & expression for experience, to avoid doing all of the things they saw done in paintings or sculptures &c. Obviously, things have since degenerated to tourism or the self-obsession of people who think they are artists against the evidence of their eyes & ours…

Who knows how to deal with all this mess? Well, not long ago I was walking the streets of old Vienna, once the imperial city of Europe, & I happened to go into a palace at the Southern end of the Hofburg, the complex of palaces of the Habsburg imperial administration—it’s mostly museums nowadays, & the one I entered is the Albertina, named for an aristocrat who started an art collection a few centuries back. Later, the Habsburgs made a catastrophic mistake in fighting the Great War an hundred years back: They lost that war &, although losing wars was a habit with them, that one cost them everything. A made up republic with its arrogant liberals took everything in the name of the Austrian people, including this Albertina museum. The Austrian people are not particularly interested & are certainly not jealous, so anyone who wants can go buy a ticket & see the sights. That’s how come I was there. This is not the great museum in the city, but as is usual in European capitals, the second best, the modern art museum, the sort of place where they start somewhere in the latter half of the 19th c., which is when things began to fall apart. The few great American cities follow this same pattern.

The first room in the Albertina is an education in how to arrange a museum—this is called curation—as well as a preparation for what the museum as a whole is dedicated to, the self-destruction of soul, artist, & what we used to call beauty. It’s not just a catalogue of the madness that overtook Europe & the sensitive types, the artists, first—it’s also an attempt, sometimes noble, even heroic, to save man from this fate. Most museums are not so thoughtfully arranged, but this is not entirely a pleasant subject, so I will only introduce you to the introduction, which is called “impressionism.” The room is oblong, with twelve canvasses on the walls, mostly arranged down the two long sides, divided between landscapes & portraits, which is not quite people & places, they are sometimes mixed together, & then there is a horse! If you’re interested in modern philosophy, read on.

1 Henri Lebasque, On the green bench, 1911
The Albertina Museum as a whole seems dedicated to cataloguing & praising the self-destruction of art, or modernism.

The proper image of that project is the beautiful woman. This may seem difficult to argue, but I point you to the art of Klimt—it is obvious there without argument. Let us make a start in that direction. What is a woman? Lebasque contrasts woman with girl. The girl is in white & seems pure, therefore, innocent, at least, unaware that she is being watched, perhaps even unaware of herself—we see clearly her hat, flower in the band, but she barely has a face, though she seems to be looking for something. A woman is something different, yet connected: The woman knows she is being watched & is indeed arranging herself for display, with flowers, hat, & book besides her. This corresponds to the desire of the artist to display his art & the desire of the man for the woman. The colors of nature, cosmic as well as vegetable, are themselves organized in the colors of her vestment. Her modernity is visible in her exotic dress, which is more like a Japanese kimono. Perhaps the blue-covered book she brought with her, too. Look at the jewels around her neck & right wrist, her clothes almost open to reveal a white slip underneath. That is almost as overwhelming as her colorful robe; her pensive face makes a remarkable contrast to everything else we see about her, so that it is not even clear whether she is passive, receptive—one indication is the flower in her left hand; a beautified beautiful woman, her mind may be elsewhere, one thing she might have in common with the girl.

We may call that freedom or nature, that nonchalance & yet incompleteness in the reclining figure of the woman. The manly contribution here, of course, is the bench on which she is sitting. It is beautifully colored & neither the dark metal legs nor the wooden beams lack a certain attractive combination of delicacy & strength, quite apart from the dominant feature, their geometric arrangement, which stands in strong contrast with the vision of the park behind, which we may call the vision of an intoxicate man. The bench brings the woman on this side, towards us who look at her, & separates her from the world to which, by her pose & colors, she seems to belong. Attention & interest individualize the woman, desire & knowledge. The woman on the bench could be comically said to be a self-portrait of the artist, mixing the female & male elements of the art. There are many things we would have to say about her pensive features & what that must mean about her life & about modern life, to speak intelligently about this matter. For an introduction, it must suffice it to say that her clothes, as her background, suggest the only context in which she can really be understood is apart from her way of life.

There are twelve pictures in all in the room & the full tour will only be available to paying readers, here below & in successive instalments-

2 Gustav Klimt, Nymphs (silver fish), 1899