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Vienna marks centenary of artistic golden era

Vienna is marking 100 years since the death of a string of luminaries from its fin-de-siecle glory days with an avalanche of exhibitions of modernist art, design and architecture that still inspire and shock today.

Vienna marks centenary of artistic golden era
Visitors walk past a painting titled "Venus in the Grotto" by Austrian artist Koloman Moser during the exhibition at the Leopold Museum titled "Vienna 1900!" Photo: AFP

The year 1918 did not only mark defeat in World War I and the end of the Austro-Hungarian empire but also saw artists Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Koloman Moser and architect Otto Wagner pass away.

Klimt died from a stroke at 55, an infection claimed Wagner's life at 76 and cancer killed Moser aged 50. Schiele survived being conscripted into the war only to die in the Spanish flu pandemic, three days after his pregnant wife Edith. He was just 28.

All were leading lights in the revolutions in art, literature, architecture, psychology, philosophy and music that made the imperial city on the Danube the buzzing intellectual hub of the world at the time.

“It was a unique collision of all forms of art and science — the literature of Hofmannsthal, the atonal music of Schönberg, psychoanalysis with Freud and even economics with Schumpeter,” Hans-Peter Wipplinger, director of the Leopold Museum, told AFP.

“Vienna was not always a trend setter, but always good at making something special out of something which already existed,” said art historian Alexandra Brauner. “We made something really special out of it.”

Stairway to Klimt

The Leopold kicked off the anniversary year this week with the first of its six special exhibitions — in Vienna and around there are around 20 — focusing on Klimt, Moser as well as Richard Gerstl and Oskar Kokoschka.

It also showcases examples of classic 1900-era design such as furniture, artisan craftwork and posters created by Moser and others in the Wiener Werkstätte community of artists that he co-founded.

From February a special Leopold show shines the light on Schiele, whose tortured eroticism still causes blushes to this day — as witnessed by the prudish covering up of genitals on advertising posters in London last year.

The Museum of Applied Arts (MAK) will from December 19 show off some of its Wiener Werkstätte treasures and from May 30 looks at the influence of Wagner's influence on contemporaries, pupils and subsequent generations of
architects and designers.

The Kunsthistorisches Museum will next month erect again its “Stairway to Klimt” allowing visitors to examine up close some of the works painted by the artist between the pillars and arches of the building early in his career.

Nazi looters

The Bank Austria Kunstforum will explore Japanese influences, the Jewish Museum will from May hark back to the artistic salons of the time, while the Klimt Villa will look into the looting of many works by the Nazis and what
happened later.

Vienna's thriving Jewish community were big drivers in the city's flourishing intellectual, scientific and artistic scene, not least in buying up artworks to fill their homes.

In his later years Klimt's studio had “two separate entrances. One for models who would then wait in an antechamber, often with next to no clothes on, and another for his rich customers,” said Baris Alakus, director of the
Klimt Villa.

By 1918, Vienna was already starting to be eclipsed, and 20 years later Hitler — rejected as a young man by the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts — annexed his native country, first robbing and then destroying the Jewish population.

The postwar restitution of artworks to their former owners' descendants, now spread around the globe, has been tortuous and in some cases incomplete, with many paintings controversially ending up in state hands.

It took until 1998 for the Austrian parliament to pass a law allowing some 10,000 works to be returned.

In one of the biggest cases, five Klimt masterpieces were returned in 2006 to the descendant of the Jewish family they were stolen from after a legal battle with Austria's Belvedere Museum.

VIENNA

Could be wurst: Vienna sausage stands push for UN recognition

From top bankers and politicians to students and factory workers, Vienna's popular sausage stands heaving with bratwurst and meaty delicacies are a longstanding cultural legacy they hope to have recognised by UNESCO.

Could be wurst: Vienna sausage stands push for UN recognition

The owners of 15 stands in the Austrian capital have formed a lobbying group and applied last week to have the “Vienna sausage stand culture” inscribed as intangible cultural heritage by the UN agency.

“We want to create a kind of quality seal for Vienna sausage stands,” said 36-year-old Patrick Tondl, one of the association’s founders whose family owns Leo’s Wuerstelstand — Vienna’s oldest operating sausage stand.

“At the sausage stand, everyone is the same… No matter if you’re a top banker who earns hundreds of thousands of euros or if you have to scrape together the last euros to buy a sausage… You meet here, you can talk to everyone,” he adds.

High inflation driving consumers looking for affordable meals, plus a new wave of vendors with updated flavours, have helped keep the stands busy.

Tondl’s great-grandfather started their business in the late 1920s, pulling a cart behind him and selling sausages at night.

The family’s customers have included former chancellor Bruno Kreisky, recalls Vera Tondl, 67, who runs the shop together with her son Patrick.

Leo’s is one of about 180 sausage stands in Vienna today, out of a total of about 300 food stands, selling fast food at fixed locations and open until the early hours, according to the city’s economic chamber.

Whereas the number of stands has remained similar over the last decade, more than a third have changed from selling sausages to kebabs, pizza and noodles, a spokesman for the chamber told AFP.

‘Momentum’

But sausage stands have seen a “mini boom” in customer numbers recently, according to Patrick Tondl.

Many have been drawn back to the stands by high inflation, where a meal can be had for less than 10 euros ($11) with lower overheads than restaurants.

New stand operators have also brought a “bit of momentum”, said Tondl, bringing the likes of organic vegetarian sausages with kimchi.

Tourists are already drawn in droves.

“When you come to Austria, it’s what you want to try,” 28-year-old Australian tourist Sam Bowden told AFP.

The cultural legacy of Vienna’s sausages is far-reaching, including the use of the term “wiener” for sausages in the United States, which is believed to have derived from the German name for Vienna, Wien.

However Sebastian Hackenschmidt, who has published a photo book on the stands, said the legacy of the “Vienna phenomena” is more complex.

He says that for many in multicultural Vienna, the sausage stands hold little appeal — equally for the growing number of vegetarians — and their universal appeal is something of a “myth”.

“Vienna is a city in great flux… With the influx of people, cultural customs are also changing,” Hackenschmidt told AFP.

Some 40 percent of Vienna’s two million inhabitants were born outside the country, where the anti-immigrant far-right looks set to top September national polls for the first time.

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