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New York has always been known for its international flavor and background, but until only recently, Austrian and German culture was not at the forefront of this range, largely due to a complicated history that has taken half a century to resolve. Culture is inevitably wrapped up in its history, and Austrian and German culture are definitely no exceptions, given the events of the last century.

However, Austrian and German modern art of the beginning of the 20st century has found a new place and home in the US, and the location could not be more appropriate: on the Museum on Fifth Avenue in New York, a formally German neighborhood. The Neue Galerie is a small but opulent institution founded in 2001 by two great enthusiasts for this period in art in the US, Ronald Lauder, renowned businessman and philanthropist, and the late Serge Sabarsky, art dealer and pioneer of German and Austrian Expressionist art in New York.

The founding of the Neue Galerie.

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The reemergence of German and Austrian Expressionist art in New York.

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Klimt’s “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I”

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The Neue Galerie has built its reputation on its meticulous showcasing of this previously underrepresented genre of art, which culminated in the history-making acquisition of its prize possession, the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I by Gustav Klimt, which the museum proudly refers to as the “Mona Lisa” of its collection. Since then, issues of restitution and provenance of artworks have become an important part of the museum’s program.

Art and history can never be separated, and the Neue Galerie came into its own in the US based on this principle. Can a monetary value be placed on works of art whose history cannot be separated from their aesthetic worth? Has German and Austrian Expressionist art now come full circle in the US, due to the attention that the Neue Galerie New York has brought to it? Sitting in the flawlessly recreated Viennese-style café of the Neue Galerie, Café Sabarsky, CastYourArt discussed these and other questions with Scott Gutterman, deputy director of the Neue Galerie. (jn)

The author Josef Kleindienst, based in Vienna, writes “audio pictures”, plays, novels, and screenplays. His work, “Become a Member”, came out in 2007.

It is an audio picture of a relationship that is formed between three people due to an unexpected event. The ones involved are paralyzed in a moment of shock and unable to escape the situation. They are trapped in this involuntary gathering and struggle with actions and words to regain their fading composure.

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The speakers are Simona Sbaffi, Andreas Patton, Manfred Stella, and Simon Hatzl. Music by Hüseyin Evirgen. Sound by Johannes Kelz. Illustration by Elsa Mährenbach. Text and direction by Josef Kleindienst.

… this is Eugen Lendl’s answer to the question about what that special quality is that predestines one for the occupation of the gallery owner. However, “most of them originate from rich parents”, he says.

About the development of the gallery. Part 1

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About the relation between artists and galery owners in time. Part 2

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As a gallery owner, Eugen Lendl has experienced the limits of the handling of art, the artists with special gifts, and the impressive consistency and power of expression, which enriches his life. He is also familiar with the commercial aspects of art and its value, which translates into a lasting relationship with the customer.

He has been in the business for forty years and he represents both contemporary international and local artists in his gallery program: Thomas Baumann, Herbert Brandl, Helen Chadwick, Manfred Erjautz, Werner Reiterer, Hubert Schmalix, Markus Wilfling, and Erwin Wurm, to name a few. He has been with some of the artists since their beginnings. In the last years, the emphasis of his art has been in sculpture, as well as painting. The areas of interest vary. According to Lendl, he develops along with his artists.

Our discussion with Eugen Lendl gave us insight into a seasoned gallery career: evolving with the times, getting older, being aware of the newer generations, but in addition, developing the ability to observe those trends from a distance and still retain the passion to make an impression. The interview became a review of the “now” factor: “There’s always a few good crazy ones” who promote and feed the art trends in the city. “I, myself “, says Eugen Lendl, “am one of them.” (wh)

Why are works of art valuable to us on a personal level? Sometimes, their value lies in how they link up with our origin: for example, an old picture which has been in the possession of our family for generations. It can also lie in its symbolic nature, if the acquisition of a work of art is coupled with a special moment in our life. Sometimes, our memories are kept alive by a work of art, addressing us in special ways that invoke happiness, reflection, or tranquility.
Beyond the personal level, art objects can be treated as cultural properties. They may possess for us unique and irretrievable styles. Their settings represent the development of certain ideas or groups of artists. They may document the awareness of the life of a generation, working as collective memories, verifying the strength of the multiplicity of human expression.
When the value of a work of art is established in financial terms, it is based on professional concerns or future precautions. It then offers an issued return or the chance to invest money profitably.
Given the multitude of priorities, insurance is an important topic in the world of art and it is requested for a variety of reasons. CastYourArt was interested in investigating these possibilities and met with Dr. Petra Eibel from UNIQA for a discussion over the matter. As a director of the department of art insurance, she includes the business of insurance from a cultural standpoint in her job description – as was the case with the recent famous theft of the salt chamber from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. At the same time, she has many years of experience of dealing with damage avoidance in the exhibition business, art trade, and private sector.

The art of insurance in a changed world of art. Part 1

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Art insurance for whom, at what time, and at which price. Part 2

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Steps for the insurance of art and possibilities of prevention. Part 3

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What are the most frequent cases of damage within the art industry and how could they be avoided? For whom does art insurance make sense? What steps need to be taken in order to establish secure insurance? How much does the insurance of art cost and what services are available in the case of emergencies? To find out more about these and other questions on art and its liability, check out our three-part interview with Dr. Petra Eibel from the art insurance company, UNIQA. (wh/jn)

Misfortune comes in various forms, as well as the possibilities for avoiding misfortune: saving money or watching TV, loving or eating up, or perhaps just sleeping together. Cultivating moderation, recognizing can also help, sometimes deceiving, patching things up in emergencies in order to hold things together, making it big, or indeed, saving the world after all? In its 41st year, Steirischer Herbst, the contemporary art festival in Graz, is in search of strategies of avoiding misfortune.

On election posters, smiling faces and simplistic strategies of avoiding misfortune can end up belittling the most complex of issues. Every advertisement promises a magic cure for avoiding misfortune: whiter teeth, low-fat sausages, power brakes. But there is something in the wind which still beckons us to approach things critically, a skeptical belief prevails that we are still able to do something.

So what about this belief? Is it justifiable and how so? The productions of Steirischer Herbst place examples of avoiding misfortune in both small as well as big spotlights. They thereby illuminate questions and nuances regarding such strategies, investigate them, often along with the participation of the public as well as scientific research, and, as always, of local and international artists and institutions for art. In our three-part report, we preview a repertorical look at the festival. In terms of strategies for avoiding misfortune, the strategy for a festival and the strategy for life can be quite similar, according to Florian Malzacher, head program director for Steirischer Herbst.

About programing the festival Steirischer Herbst

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The leitmotif of the festival

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The art of avoiding misfortune in Steirischer Herbst 2008

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Over a hundred events are offered during the three-week-long program of Steirischer Herbst, which kicks off on October 2nd. The search is distributed throughout about thirty locations and the strategies of avoiding misfortune, we hope, will be appreciated throughout the entire city and beyond. (wh/jn)

“Contemporary art as a field for human freedom, as a possibility to understand a modern individual’s view of society.” The field of freedom is much broader than it would be without contemporary art, according to Slavko Bogdanovic, lawyer and chairman of the board of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Vojvodina. Therefore, it is already in the interest of all to maintain its existence.

The basic conditions for contemporary art are undergoing a radical change in Vojvodina, as in other parts of Serbia and the Southeast-European world. The pre-war structures of production, mediation, theory formation, and marketing have been destroyed or taken over; missing resources have been preventing and making the new conditions for advancement more difficult for a long time up until today. But the attitudes of many people in the art enterprise have changed. Instead of commiserating over existing adversities, they are taking action.

Museum für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Vojvodina. Part 1

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Museum für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Vojvodina. Part 2

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Museum für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Vojvodina. Part 3

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In January, 2007, an international competition was announced for the planning of a museum of contemporary art in Vojvodina. The jury selected the Canadian-Serbian team made up of Robert Claiborne, Lia Ruccolo, and Ivan Markov in the following June. The plan for the new museum will introduce a new era to the building of contemporary art. There will be a change, both physically and conceptually, according to Ljubica Milovic. She is the director of the project development and is looking positively forward. Gone is the fear of works of art becoming waterlogged by an overflowing Danube. Gone is also the time of a lack of restoration materials and its correlating continual shortage of space, which was gradually transforming the museum from an exhibition space into an art storage facility. Instead of relying on economic fate, there is hope in new and especially private sponsors, and in a world that is open to a Serbia that can in turn itself be open. The vision of the building has symbolic value. It represents the official opening of the art of the country and its inlet into a world which was, until now, not open to Serbians. However, the project has still not been realised, until now, the museum only exists in the planning stage.

Smaller organizations in the second largest city of Serbia, for example, the Center for New Media kuda.org or the Art Klinika—which dedicates itself to artistically healing a society that is still recovering from the evils of war and nationalism—are more mobile due to their structure, and perhaps more open. It is a question of facing the necessity to meet changing conditions with new concepts, regarding which the director of the museum, Zivko Grozdanic, is full of ideas.

In regard to the issues of for what a museum of modern art should stand and wherein its current efforts in the context of the world of art lie, check out the Serbian view regarding these questions, which were posed by CastYourArt’s Ewa Stern in Novi Sad, in our podcast episode. (wh/jn)

A good five centuries ago, a navigator called Vespucci had gained the respect of a cartographer called Waldseemüller, who decided to christen the Mundus Novus as the continent of America. The interest in Europe in imported goods from the New World had grown significantly in this time. With economic expansion, the Old World had also opened up a new area of knowledge, which was meant to be conquered scientifically.

Against the backdrop of this newly developing landscape of knowledge in the sixteenth century, the Milanese painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo began making portraits of human faces arranged from seafood, fruits, and vegetables in the court of the Habsburg king, Maximillian II. Of course, this kind of metamorphosis of the human face had already been mesmerizing people at the time and could have been considered a sensational visual gimmick on the part of Arcimbaldo, according to Dr. Sylvia Ferino, the curator at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. However, at the same time, Arcimboldo’s pictures were a sign of the awakening of the natural sciences and the humanistic reflection of the European self in the mirror of the new world.

After Arcimboldo was summoned to Vienna by Emperor Ferdinand I as a copy artist and portraitist, his duties were extended under the emperor’s son, Maximillian II, and grandson, Rudolf II. Arcimboldo then documented flora and fauna for the artistically- and scientifically-interested royal family. Elements of this activity found their way into his composite head figures, which also served as subjects of opinion and study for the scholarly writings of the scientists of its time. In addition, Arcimboldo invented hydraulic machines, sketched bridges, developed synaesthetic theories, and acted as the royal court artist due to his universal skills. On top of that, he was held in high regard by his employers for the imperial celebrations that he hosted. He was also well respected by fellow intellectuals such as Ulisse Aldrovandi, the founder of the modern zoology.

Sylvia Ferino – Pears as Tearducts, a Corncob for an Ear. Part 1

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Sylvia Ferino – Pears as Tearducts, a Corncob for an Ear. Part 2

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Dr. Sylvia Ferino, with whom we spoke about the connection of Arcimboldo’s work to the social background of his time, has been honored several times for her work with the icons of Italian Renaissance painting. Along with many other projects, she curated the Arcimboldo exhibition, which was shown at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris, and at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. (wh/jn)

In the art world, one thing leads to another—this is the principle by which Hans Knoll began his career as an art dealer, which remains his guiding principle up until today. Knoll began in the early 80s with a space, a weekly dinner among friends, artists, and accompanying guests, and the possibilities that arose from this set-up led to exhibitions, performances, and music. These events were at the time more along the lines of occasions for bonding. However, they eventually turned into serious gallery events and the subsequent realization that one must expand beyond Vienna in order to truly develop in the art world.

In the first half of the 1980s, the young art dealer was already getting involved with the art world in Hungary. He founded an artists’ co-op in Budapest as a kind of communist counterpart to his gallery and thereby set himself apart in the art world from the surrounding East European countries. When the door between the East and West was opened, it became apparent to Knoll that his position would remain relatively neutral. He curated exhibitions that mediated both sides and by the beginning of the 1990s, he realized that the sudden massive interest from the West in art from the unknown Eastern European countries which accompanied the opening of the borders could be to some extent a temporary disadvantage.

Hans Knoll - Art as a Form of Mediation, Interview Part 1

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Hans Knoll - Art as a Form of Mediation, Interview Part 2

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Hans Knoll - Art as a Form of Mediation, Interview Part 3

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Hans Knoll - Art as a Form of Mediation, Interview Part 4

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Knoll realized that his ability to stay inspired during this time of upheaval required stamina. He often considered closing his gallery during this time, but in the end, he met the challenge and began to work in Moscow. He now finds St. Petersburg a very exciting place for art.

Knoll’s desire to develop, to network, as well as his stability and his realistic grasp of his own possibilities and limitations have opened many doors for him in the art world. He works very closely with Blue Noses und AES+F, from Russia, as well as representing the Hungarian artists, Ákos Birkás und Csaba Nemes. In Austria, the Gallery Knoll also represents artists such as Mara Mattuschka und Wilhelm Scherübl. (wh/jn)

As opposed to other media like film or music, in principle, painting does not lend itself to as many possibilities, explains the painter, Thomas Reinhold. Throughout history, there have been painters who have tried to expand the range of the medium of painting time and time again. Take the case of Viennese Actionism, for which action painting or happenings—for example, fluxus art is not meant to extend the possibilities of the painting—always become something else instead.

In the mid-seventies, Thomas Reinhold studied at the University for Applied Art in Vienna, when Actionism was still determining the current artistic climate. For many, the medium of painting was still not performative enough, hence, it only held a small part in the curriculum as opposed to other media. Reinhold was doing photography at the time. His work was successful—shown at the Graz Forum City Park as well as in art fairs in Basel and New York.

Thomas Reinhold calls his eventual path to painting a reaction to the artistic tenor of this time, against which he consciously set out a counterpoint, as well as against the master-class system of the university, within which young artists would always work in exactly the same manner as their teachers. Reinhold began with figurative painting. For “Odysseus”, a work from 1981, he painted himself—naked, a sword in hand, in the front of a portico. Before him is a forge, in the background, a futuristically cubist-like figure: his alter ego. The painter describes these compositions as a form of “iconographic complexity”. At this time, his painting was already formal and had become less prone to explanation—the way in which he then, within a few years, already made himself known. His following work developed into a purely painterly reflection: for him painting became an empirical act, an attempt to understand what the possibilities of painting are.

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Thomas Reinhold paints in order to explore and discover. The multitude of possibilities that exist for transforming the many layers of color that act as signs of the temporality of the act of painting into an experience of spatial depth, occupies him just as much as the facets of perception that are related to the anatomy of the human eye. In addition, in the last few years, he has been experimenting with the independence of materials. The flow of the paint becomes the painterly means: Reinhold tests their fluidity against the background of precisely calculated pictorial compositions. His search for the natural courses of flowing colors forces them into a reduction. Diversions which could normally distract from the nature of the material fall away. In this way, this researcher experiences what the pictorial material brings out of his own paintings. The flowing colors cannot always be guided, sometimes, they must go their own way. The use of fluid colors under the laboratory conditions of the composition can lead to its fair share of smaller or larger disasters. Reinhold does not exactly paint according to the tenets of Actionism, but he does integrate actionistic dimensions of his materials into his painting. As a result, he has successfully expanded the medium of painting—which in principle has very few possibilities—in a different way than what was possible in the Actionism of the 70s. The medium remains intact—without having to develop into something else. (wh/jn)

“He was discovered at an exhibition. Since then, he has been the outsider who routinely gets slammed by the critics. He is the only “modern” in Vienna. He sees ghosts, secretly suffering souls. He loves to rub salt into wounds. He will end up going mad. These are all compiled from my reviews…” —Oskar Kokoschka to his friend in Berlin, Herwarth Walden, in 1911. He had become acquainted with the publisher of the expressionist magazine, Der Sturm, through the writer and journalist, Karl Kraus. He had been occasionally working with Walden for a year already.

Kokoschka, who wrote this letter when he was just 25 years old, had already gained success in recent years. He was “expressive”—as a painter and writer, as an up-and-coming artist, as well as as a lover. His unbridled expression, his distancing from art nouveau, his bluntness polarized and provoked the artistic establishment and society in Vienna and elsewhere—often to violent reactions. Die Presse called him the “Oberwildling von Wien” (“The Wild Child of Vienna”); in 1909, the opening of his drama, “Mörder - Hoffnung der Frauen” (“Murderer - Liberator of Women”), led to his expulsion from art school.

However, his genius demanded acknowledgment. Adolf Loos had recognized and encouraged his artistic potential early on and guided him along his first steps into painting. Karl Kraus remained close to him, as did Wolfgang Gurlitt, the Berlin art dealer who later became the director of the Neue Galerie in Linz.

Kokoschka found the inspiration for many of his works through his passionate relationship with Alma Mahler. When she got pregnant by him but refused the artist’s undying devotion, Kokoschka was driven to volunteer as a soldier in the First World War.

Kokoschka eventually recovered from the trauma of lost love and its subsequent war injuries, as reported by Alfred Weidinger, a well- known Kokoschka connoisseur and chief curator of the Austrian Belvedere Museum. We asked Wiedinger for an account of Oskar Kokoschka—the man and the painter—as well as about his background and his development. You can hear the results of our discussion in the following three-part podcast series on Oskar Kokoschka. (wh/jn)

Alfred Weidinger - Oskar Kokoschka’s Expressive Art, Interview Part 1

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Alfred Weidinger - Oskar Kokoschka’s Expressive Art, Interview Part 2

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Alfred Weidinger - Oskar Kokoschka’s Expressive Art, Interview Part 3

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