After having traveled all the way from Vienna to the Schiele Museum in Cesky Krumlow in the Czech Republic I looked about town to see what is in my immediate vicinity. The big billing goes to the Schiele collection in the new Leopold Museum in the equally new Museum Quarters near the Vienna Ringstrasze at the foot of Mariahilferstrasze. The setting about the museum is grand, the royal stables converted for arts and events. The Museum itself is a colossal box; the architecture more or less fails to please. There are indeed a great many Schiele drawings and paintings to be seen. The remainder of the collection is interesting primarily from an art historical perspective. The stars on display are a few stunning works by Gustav Klimt and the many Schiele paintings and drawings which are all of a dark and depressing nature. They appear not at all like the reproductions commonly seen in books where color and contrast are inevitably enhanced. I think they reveal the deeply troubled nature of the artist. It is forbidden to take pictures and the ban is strictly enforced; there are nearly as many guards as there are rooms, and they follow you at all times as if you were a suspected art thief; hence, just the photograph of the poster on the outside wall.

The best of Schiele's work is in the Belevedere Museum. The collection in this museum is splendid, well save the few abstract pieces in the lower tract of the Upper Museum - antidote?

Personally I am not much interested in the genre works of the 18th and 19th Century but there is some fine craftsmanship to be seen. The Lower Museum is well worth a visit with a collection of Messerschmidt heads and an absolutely amazing new collection of church art with exhibits dating all the way back to the 13th Century. It is stunning to see how the colors are preserved and how expressively the stories are depicted.

This leaves one more journey for me: to Tulln where Schiele was also thrown in jail for lewd behavior. The jail is now the gallery. I shall go and visit it soon and hopefully come back with more photographs.

Greetings from Vienna,
Herb Ranharter
http://www.delarte.com

P.S.: Just in, hot off the press: The Schiele Center in Cesky Krumlow is in trouble. The international effort that created this museum has fallen pray to political infighting among the trustees. It got so bad that the governing of the museum had to be taken over by the major of Cesky Krumlow. The major describes the situation as totally out of hand. The result is a loss of funding from abroad and the peril of closure.