Europe 2013: May 30th, Vienna Albertina

5/30 Thursday

It’s pretty cold and rainy today – perfect for a museum visit. We head to the Albertina, a grand, sprawling, classical building in the palace complex at the city center. The first exhibition is Monet to Picasso, rooms full of post impressionist masters, reminiscent of the Barnes Collection we love so much. We enjoy a break in the museum café, paying dearly, but still, it’s so cool. We move on to Ruben/Rembrandt/Bosch/Breughel, which is a fantastic collection of mostly drawings. We’re just completely awed by the transformation of simple pencil lines into such incredible renderings.

We’re sort of done, but we decide to see the next exhibition, a retrospective of Gottfried Helnwein, whom we’ve never heard of. Of whom we have never heard. We’re so glad we stayed, because the work is unbelievable. The entire museum floor is filled with huge paintings, super-realistic; they look like massive photographs, but so eerie, disturbing, fascinating. The thematic model is a young girl, powder-pale, in a simple shift, against a gray void. Her face is wrapped in gauze, or with her shift soaked in blood, or gazing quietly at some other beyond the room, or holding a machine gun. There are references to Nazis, fires of battle, anime, evil Disney, mutants. The artist’s comment on the wall, to paraphrase, is that people are so incensed, angered and disturbed, ready to mount a protest, over millimeters of paint on a canvas, but not over the reality of destruction that we tolerate against our children.

Well. After all that, we walk along our tram line, and find an authentic Weiner pub, dark wood and old tiles, lots of local types, just right. We putz with our computer and smartphone with a beer in hand for an hour, decompressing, relaxing, catching up, unhurried. We have little dinner of old-world style pork roast with sauerkraut. Just right.

The tram is right nearby and gets us back to our neighborhood, no problem.