albertina

tomorrow is my last day in the city, but everything will be closed, so i took today to say goodbye, and wandered around, buying gifts for people, hunting down a jewelry store that had haunted me since i'd been there last wednesday (i bought this huge, fantastic ring that's a mirror with a cross on one side and on the other side says "spiegel, spiegel, auf dem Wand..." (mirror, mirror, on the wall...)), spent a pleasant hour in cafe central (i've grown to love it there. this was my fourth trip. i haven't revisited anywhere else so often), getting eis (ice cream, as i learned the hard way. keep that crap out of my coffee) in stephansplatz, looking around and feeling kinda sad. 

this city...it's amazing. just amazing. it's a combination of history and modern life, an awareness of the past with a sense of living everyday life to its highest quality. the cafes on the sidewalk, where people sit with beer or espresso at every time of the day, the museums that sit next door to a shoe outlet mall, hearing "grüß gott!" or "servus!" to greet you and remind you how far from home you are, trying to navigate a city that speaks a language that you only have the most tenuous grasp of. 

i'll save the rest of my goodbye aria for tomorrow (my plans for tomorrow include a trip to zentralfriedhof, as mentioned below, a trip back here to pack, and then a long walk in the evening, when all the buildings and museums are lit up. i imagine i'll wax quite philosophical tomorrow night...i'm pretty sure i'll get kind of teary, too), because today i want to talk about my trip to the albertina musuem, which i took on impulse and was INCREDIBLE. 

i was thinking this morning over espresso and orange juice (oh, ps: i seem to have become addicted to orange juice while i've been here. i mean, i constantly crave it. and i HATE juice. ALL juice. but i've been guzzling it by the gallon lately. weird) about what i should do with my last "business day" in vienna. i thought maybe i should go outside my box and actually take an organized tour (gasp!), maybe of the danube in a boat (like the circle tours of nyc), or in a fiaker, or something. but then i realized that this whole trip has been about doing the things that make me happiest....studying music, looking at art, drinking coffee, walking through cities, exploring...and i realized that that was how i wanted to end my trip. 

so i went to the albertina, which is really beautiful, and saw a large, comprehensive exhibit they have on of paul klee, whose works i wasn't really familiar with until today. i tell you what, some of them are pretty spectacular. of all the modern art movements, i find i really like abstract expressionism, (abstrakter expressionismus...german-spanking) most of all, rather than true expressionism like kandinsky (blech. i know i'm studying him for this project, but i REALLY don't like kandinsky) or kokoshka (same there, minus the studying him part). 

but klee blurs the lines between the two, and some of his paintings are just gorgeous. i was going to find pictures for you, but i can't seem to find the ones i want. :( sorry. 

anyway, then i went upstairs and saw their new collection, on permanent loan, called "sammlung batliner, monet bis picasso" (the batliner collection, monet to picasso). that's right, people, today i saw: monet, renoir, degas, kandinsky, kokoschka, miro (yay!), ROTHKO, magritte, signac (i didn't know much about him, but his stuff is pretty damn cool), sam francis (whom i've loved for a while, but his stuff his hard to find), francis bacon, munch, picasso, and many, many more. 

here's the rothko i saw. it's huge! and wonderful. i heart rothko.

 

things like this...like with monet and david, it's almost imperative that you see them in real life to fall in love with them. jackson pollock, too. i remember the first time i saw a pollock...it was in the cleveland museum of art (which is a fabulous musuem, by the way, and free. i used to go almost every week between my rehearsals in cleveland on saturdays in my senior year of high school), and is called "anger". here it is: 

and i remember standing in front of it and thinking, "yeah, that's exactly what it feels like to be angry". but these paintings by rothko, pollock, etc, they're HUGE and they're totally engrossing, but you have to SEE them. 

so that's how i spent my day, engrossed in modern art and buying people presents...now i'm going to grab some dinner and head to the rathausplatz...they're showing la boheme tonight!