Two imaginary Viennese museums

Today I will describe and enjoy two imaginary museums that I found in Carl E. Schorske’s Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (1980).

The actual Viennese Museum of Fine Arts, the Kunsthistorisches Museum, is the most beautiful big art museum I have ever seen (and the collection is not so bad either).  The photo of the interior featured at Wikipedia is merely the coffee shop.  Vienna has other nice buildings, too, I have heard.  I was not there for very long.  This post is about what the Viennese, circa 1900,  could have had.

Camillo Sitte became more influential as a theorist of city planning than as an architect.  He was a backward-looking Wagnerian, a devotee of the total work of art that was not only beautiful of itself but also created a national myth that would lead to “the revitalization of the German people in this hyper-cerebral, utilitarian age” (70).  Wagnerism, the ideology of Wagner, is a puzzle, a subject for future research.

Sitte’s museum would be “a great tower, a national monument to German culture” (104), located not in the city but on “a barren beach” – of a lake, I guess, right?  The tower would be filled not with the treasures of the imperial Hapsburgs but with the results of a seven-volume encyclopedia of art forms Sitte was compiling.  The museum would be called “The Dutchman’s Tower,” likely named after Richard Wagner’s Flying Dutchman perhaps conflated with the crazy scene in Goethe’s Faust Part II where Faust builds a tower in Holland.  All scenes in Faust II are crazy.

So: bad idea, yes, the Wagnerian Goethean tower on a beach?  No?  How about this next one.

Otto Wagner (an unrelated non-Wagnerian Wagner)was a theorist but also a practical architect, the designer of a number of significant buildings in central Vienna.  He became a supporter of the Viennese avant garde, including Gustav Klimt and other artists of the Viennese Secession, as I might have guessed from his idea for a museum.

He wanted a single unfinished gallery divided into twenty units.  Every five years, a commission of artists, or perhaps a single artist, would fill a unit with “am integrated exhibition of the best art and architecture produced in a given half-decade” (105).  Then – this is the great part, the bad idea that lifts into greatness – that section is never changed.

The building would become a series of time capsules.  No curation, no revision.  Wagner wrote that this system would show “’a clear picture of the state of artistic production over the coming century.’”  I am imagining two visits to the museum, one in 1905, with one room full of Klimts and other wonderful things – I will give the initial period credit – and the other 95 percent of the empty hall, brightly lit, stretching into the future.  And then I imagine visiting the hall today, marveling at the kitsch.  What might be in the “1936-1940” room?  How often would a room be the visual equivalent of the World’s Best Novels, 1899 edition?

Do not get me wrong, if some madman had built one or both of these museums, they would be high on my list of places to visit the next time I am in Vienna, at least on the days when I had worn out the Kunsthistorisches Museum and checked off the Secession building and Hundertwasserhaus and – I guess they would not be that high on my list, but they would be on it.

Gothic Revival bookshelves - some build-it-yourself ideas

The Gothic Revival (1999) by Chris Brooks is another of those beautiful books in the Phaidon Arts & Ideas series, my Ideal Art Book.  It is hardly the most mellifluously written book in the series, I believe because it is burdened by necessary but tedious lists of architects and buildings.  I don't have a better suggestion - maybe tables, not lists?  Hardly more elegant.

Regardless, the book did just what I wanted it to do, filling in a lot of the intellectual and artistic context of the Gothic Revival in England and elsewhere.  Reading and teaching Ruskin led me here.  If I ever go on a driving tour of England, I am going to return to this book an make my own list, of places to visit.  The illustrations and building photography are superb, as in every book in the series.

Forget the buildings, though, and the ideas, and the political meaning of Belgian Gothic Revival ecclesiastical architecture.  I want to look at bookshelves.  To the left (from p. 340), we see The Great Bookcase (it has a name!), built 1859-62 by "William Burges and others."  Take a trip to Knighthayes Court in Devon to see it for yourself.  It's about ten and a half feet high.  You might want to contact your local cabinet-maker and commission one of these.  It's your duty, really, to help fight the recession.

The book owner who is understandably worried about the inadequate size of The Great Bookcase will want to consider the oak specimen pictured below (p. 356), built by the Austrians Bernardis and Kranner in 1850.  This beauty was dispatched to the 1851 Geat Exhibition as an example of Austrian craftsmanship, and now resides in the Victoria and Albert Museum.   The dimensions are 463 x 579 cm, or 15 ft 2 1/2 in x 19 ft.  You could omit the little statues and towers if that's too tall for your library.  Or you could raise the ceiling of your library.

Looking for Old Japan

The Japan Lady Isabella Bird visited in 1878 is gone. One can visit it in books and pictures, but there's almost nothing else left. World War II was unbelievably destructive, but before that the 1923 earthquake, the 1868 Meiji restoration, and any number of other fires and earthquakes had demolished swathes of the country.

Last winter I discussed my difficulties with the issue in Vienna* and Munich and Paris. Tokyo is even harder to think about - the Incurable Logophile mentioned this in a comment way back then. Almost everything in Tokyo is new, and even the old places are only old in certain respects. The Senso-ji Shrine in the Asakusa neighborhood, for example, dates from the 7th century. But the visitor won't find a scrap that old. Almost everything dates from the 1950s, or later. Actually, I think the two demon statues in the photo of the Treasure House Gate are pretty old. Not 7th century, though!

The Senso-ji Shrine is a functioning place of worship, visited by millions. It's kept freshly painted. Additions or changes are made every once in a while. It's not a museum. The visitor needs to mesh the history of the place with its current life.

I visited a samurai castle in the small city of Odiwara that I knew, the instant I saw it, was a restoration. The culprit here was not the Americans but the Meiji emperor, tearing down the centers of samurai power in the 1870s. The current building dates from the 1950s, and only the outside was restored - inside it was a museum of historical artifacts, mostly regional samurai stuff.

I'm not complaining. The world moves on. That's Yokohama Bay to the left - can you imagine Commodore Perry's black ships there, opening Japan to the outside world? I can't, not really. But I was looking for Japan's past, so I tried.

* See praymont's series of posts on cafés in Vienna. He did his homework. Vienna has chosen to freeze parts of itself in the Belle Epoque - a fine choice! - and as a result a certain slice of the past is always with the visitor. Tokyo does not work that way.

How old is a city?

Americans have an idea that Europe is impossibly old. I went to Epiphany Mass (to hear Schubert's Mass in B Major) in the Salzburg Cathedral, which is a 1959 reconstruction of a 1628 Baroque masterpiece, replacing the original church from 774, which itself may very well have been built on an older Roman or Celtic religious site. That number 774 can be powerfully distracting. But 1959 is important, too. The Salzburg Old City, inhabited since prehistoric times (that's pretty old!), is dominated by a dramatic crag with a medieval fortress at one end and what anyone could guess is a museum of contemporary art at the other.

Salzburg is a lovely reconstructed tourist town, easily worth a stay of several days. I'm just saying that sometime it was a little hard to know just what I was looking at.

In the architecture chapter of Notre Dame de Paris, Victor Hugo, in 1830, laments the destruction of medieval Paris, which he recreates in the novel. Only a few monuments were left, and when Hugo was writing, even those, even Notre Dame, were wrecks. Not to mention Roman Paris, or Celtic Paris, gone with almost no trace.* Note that this is all before Hausmann's massive modernization, laying out the parks and boulevards and train stations. Paris as it exists now is really a 19th century city.

I felt the same way about Vienna and to some degree about Munich. Their current layout really dates fom the 19th century - those central train stations required a lot of demolition and urban renewal. The feel of these cities is greatly complicated by their destruction in World War II. Even some of the oldest buildings are substantially rebuilt. And some of the old buildings aren't that old at all - the Alte Pinakothek in Munich (1836), or the glorious Kunsthistorisches Museum (1888),** are contemporaries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1872) and the Art Institute of Chicago (1892). Museums, like train stations, are 19th century phenomena.

This is all impressionistic enough that I sympathize with anyone who thinks its nonsense.*** I'm interested in how others have felt about cities they have visited.

* One Sunday morning, wandering around in the Latin Quarter, I was startled to find myself in the center of a tiny Roman amphitheater, now the center of a little park.

** Really, such a beautiful museum, even aside from its contents, which include a room of Breughels that is surely one of the great museum galleries in the world.

*** I could add this caveat to every post.