Today we went to the Belvedere Palace. It used to be a peautiful palace of some one, whose name I have forgotten, long ago. The word belvedere means “beautiful view”, which it of course had. But, the admission was now full priced again. Goodbye National Holiday. My friend Karen had suggested this museum for one reason, it has the painting “The Kiss” by Gustav Klimt. But there are other reasons to come here, like other famous works by Klimt, along with some other amazing Austrian artists. If you are not familiar with The Kiss, it is beautiful. It is huge too. The part of the painting at the bottom, with the tiny purple flowers looks partly unfinished and you can see some of the original sketch in pencil. But, it is almost unnoticed once your eyes move upward to the center of attention. Here there is a couple entwined in a passionate kiss. Their clothing gleams with gold leaf and silver paint. It is memorizing. You can feel the emotion. I mean who doesn’t want to be kissed like that.

I enjoyed this museum, not just because of this painting though. I liked it because it was not as crazy as everything that we saw yesterday during the holiday. Sometimes with more time in a building and not feeling as rushed, I can actually step back, or sit down, and enjoy the art. I start to pick up more of the details and can then try to see what the artist was trying to express on the canvas. It is weird but it does happen. Also, sometimes in the smaller museums when you have the audioguide you have more time to listen to them in depth and you are not doing “Power Art” and running around like crazy.

Tags: Belvedere Palace,Gustav Klimt,The Kiss
Categories: Becky Blogs, Vienna
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Vienna the capital of the Austria!    It was great we came in on  the national  holiday of neutrality.  The old school Austrian Empire  was ran by a royal dynasty called the Hapsburg’s.  They were on the losing side of World War I in 1918 and had their Empire cut up into much smaller pieces  until it became the current size.  Then we, the (winners), forced them to become forever neutral.   The Austrians celebrate their forced neutrality because  it marked the day the  Russians finally left their country and no longer occupied it.   The best part there was a huge fair with music and tanks and all of the museums were half off.  Whoo hoo!    Plus, I had a pretzel, and I love giant pretzels!  It was like the giant pretzels for Oktoberfest in Muchen.  Yummy!

In all of my art history books from high school to college, the very first picture of art was 25 thousand (yes 25,000) years old, give or take a 1000 years.  Each year I would remember seeing this piece in my school books.  It was a primitive sculpture of a woman called the “Venus of Willendorf”.  Imagine how old that is.   I mean Egypt was not even hitting the good times until 3000 B.C.   That is one old sexy bitch!   The experts are not quite sure what she was for.   Some say that she has no face because of the hair style, while other say she could have been a faceless  fertility symbol.  Having all that fat makes for good babies.   I am sure that it was not easy gaining all that weight while doing the hunting and gathering thing.   No McD’s around.   A healthy child bearing woman may have been a plump woman.   So being voluptuous was dead sexy back then. 

  

 

 The next day we saw one of my favorite artists Gustav Klimt.  His golden works are amazing and I loved his most famous painting “The Kiss”.   It’s golden delicious.  The paint was so beautiful and yummy looking like you could eat it.  Klimt actually painted gold leaf on to the canvas to give it that shiny golden colour.  His use of colorful patters in the flowers, background and especially the robes is exquisite.  Note how the man’s robe is made of more powerful rectangles in comparison to the woman’s softer circular patterns.

That sums up 2 days in Vienna!

Tags: Austria,Gustav Klimt,neutral,pretzel,The Kiss,venus of willendorf,Vienna,Wien
Categories: Chris Blogs, Vienna
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