In a nutshell, today was Day 1 of 2 of Jessica suffering Ryan's love and appreciation for modern art. Day 2 was much worse. At least today offered some Gustav Klimt and the discovery of a new favorite artist.
We started off at the Albertina Museum, just across from the opera house and the Monument Against War and Fascism. The Albertina houses "modern" (read: avant-garde) art stemming back to the 1700s, from Picasso to Egon Schiele. In fact, there was a huge Egon Schiele exhibit while we were there, which was fascinating to go through. (We'd gone through some of his works together while in a bookstore in Portland years and years ago, and a print of one of his many self-portraits hangs over Ryan's desk, but otherwise we knew very little about him. Dude was messed up, but his art was cool.) My favorite part of the museum was discovering an artist I really love, who Ryan also enjoyed enough to dub him "a new favorite": Franz Sedlacek, a thoroughly depressed Polish artist whose work is a perfect mix of creepy and amazing.
We had lunch at 1516 craft brewery, where we sat under a huge awning and watched the rain. (Other than this quick spell, we were so lucky that our time in Salzburg, Vienna, and Budapest was completely dry and not too hot.) We then headed to the Belvedere, a multi-part museum housed in the beautiful and expansive Belvedere Palace, whose gardens sprawl in marble steps, elegant fountains, trimmed almost-maze-like hedges, and curly flower designs. The Belvedere has all kinds of art, including the famous painting of Napoleon riding into battle, but it's most known for its number of Gustav Klimt pieces (including the original "The Kiss").
Quick confession: I only know about Klimt because IKEA also has quite a few of his prints in the home décor and frame section.
And then came one of my favorite moments from our trip: Ryan found his great-great-grandmother's marriage license, which had her home address written in beautiful script: Rudolfsplatz 12, in Vienna's Jewish quarter. And indeed, just around the corner from the Holocaust Memorial and Jewish Plaza (Judensplatz), we found her home at the turn of the century: It looks out over a small square park, and is now a textile firm...something that should be unsurprising, given that the entire area is known for its textiles and that Hanny Deutsch (his great-great-grandmother) moved to New York to start her own textile business.
We headed back to the hotel, which was only just across the bridge from Hanny's home, and got dressed up for the evening's opera. As a wedding and graduation present, Carole got us tickets to see Verdi's "Rigoletto" for my very first time, and it was incredible. Our favorite part of the experience--besides just seeing such a famous opera house--was the awesome set design, which included a huge rotating structure with various "scenes" built into different sides. The effect, with its dead trees, sharp corners, and colorless décor, was just edgy enough for the opera itself.
We ended the night exploring much more of Vienna than we meant to, considering we were just trying to find an open bar with finger foods. Even though it was just 10 PM, we had no luck and finally settled on Mel's Craft Beers, where they at least had some cool salads and charcuterie. This is a pretty important element of Vienna that I'll return to in Hungary: the absence of a non-college-y nightlife. On the plus side, it gave us an excuse to explore a side of Vienna we hadn't seen.
