As a sign of our solidarity within the fight against HIV and the social exclusion of HIV positive people. A flash mob, initiated by the Viennese Museum Belvedere - we filmed at Kiss@Belvedere …

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An exhibition on the statesman and art patron Prince Eugene of Savoy-Carignan at Vienna’s Orangerie and Lower Belvedere.
 This podcast was realised with the kind support of UNIQUA ArtCercles.

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Prinz Eugen, as he is known in Austria, was a renowned lover and collector of art and left a vast collection of paintings, copper engravings, books and hand writings. He became one of the most influential Austrians of his time when he moved to the country after being rejected by Louis XIV for service in the French army.

As a commander he was a daredevil, willing to sacrifice human lives by the thousands more »

Centuries do not have clear boundaries, rather, they flow into each other in the same way that the years which they are made up of do. The transition period in which the nineteenth and twentieth century collapsed into each other was called the fin de siècle. The fact that something was coming to an end was a modern perspective.

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In 1918, Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Otto Wagner, and Koloman Moser all died within a year. Accompanying them was the fall of turn-of-the-century, successfully up-and-coming, modern Austrian art. So what remained in terms of artistic progress? For one thing, there was Oskar Kokoschka. He had moved to Dresden and fled—as did a majority of the intellectual and artistic heavyweights—upon the rise of the National Socialists: first to Prague, and then to London. And then there was Herbert Boeckl, who stayed behind. This starting point was not exactly ideal for the development of the painter: an authoritarian, conservative, anti-modern mood prevailed in Austria, along with a shortage of moral support from colleagues. more »

In the last few years, the boundaries between interior decoration, art, and design have begun to blur. Within this trend, each discipline contributes its own unique qualities. This direction has resulted in a combination of presenting individual artistic vision and adjusting to the demands of the market. One can describe this phenomenon as a kind of product-building exchange between the senders and the recipients - for which, in our case, the model rooms serve as the means of communication.

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The history of Viennese model rooms goes back several centuries. The beginnings of example-setting ideal spaces were already emerging in the second half of the seventeenth century. The first attempts focused on the careful selection of materials, then furnishings were added gradually, such as furniture and lighting. Industrial development, economic progress, and improved quality of living cleared the way for individual expression. more »

The early works of Oswald Oberhuber, born in Meran in 1931, are classified as informal sculpture. The artist has always felt that it was too limiting to develop himself artistically as the representative of a specific style. In the late 1950s, Oberhuber was already turning against an understanding of art oriented toward styles and pursued a theory and practice of permanent change. As an artist, as a teacher and head at the University of Applied Art in Vienna, and as a director of the Galerie nächst St. Stephan, Oberhuber’s work pursues new directions and breaks conventional notions. In the early 1970s, in an Innsbruck hospital, he produced an abstract sculpture out of industrially manufactured exhaust tubes. The art work—which defied the usual conceptions of art—became a nationwide sensation, but then somehow ended up in the hands of a plumber. An artist protest saved the work of art from being divided up and sold off for individual parts.

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For the Belvedere in Vienna, Oberhuber has created a site-specific installation which includes drawings, paintings, and sculptures that are thematically related to Prince Eugen of Savoy, who was the founder of the Belvedere. Thematic exhibitions suit the artist. The thematic approach accommodates his resolution of permanent change: it not only permits artistic movement, but challenges it as well. more »

a ) animals that belong to the emperor, b) embalmed ones, c) tamed ones, d) suckling pigs, e) sirens, f) fabulous ones, g) stray dogs, h) those that are included in this classification, i) those that tremble as if they were mad, j) innumerable ones, k) those that are drawn with the finest camel hair brush, l) and so on, m) those that have broken the water jug, n) those that resemble flies from a distance.

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This unusual taxonomy of the organisms from the animal realm, attributed by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges to a Chinese encyclopedia, was the inspiration for the French philosopher Michel Foucault for a book about the connection between our world of words and that of things. more »

In 1908, Adolf Loos published a polemic modern architecture pamphlet titled “Ornament and Crime”. Ornamentation, he argues, is redundant, cost-intensive kitschy decoration, and an expression of the cultural backwardness which can be found in primitive cultures, and which is not representative of modern man. “The barbarian era,” the architect concludes, “is finally past.”

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Only a few years later, Siegfried Kracauer showed that even the modern era, which strives for practicality and rationalization, produces ornaments on its surface. He argues that these ornamentations are an expression of modern mass society, visual representations of modern life and its realities. The ornamentation is not taken into consideration by the masses who produce it. It develops without their knowledge. They do not produce it consciously or on purpose, which is why it resembles “the aerial shots of landscapes and cities”, in which patterns only emerge for the distant viewer. more »

“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.

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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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. more »