Palais du Belvédère

By -
On Monday, we headed to the Belvedere!  What a beautiful museum.  It is composed of two main buildings plus some outliers.  It is within the city of Vienna.  

 We only went to the upper building.  Outside the building, they had a number of pieces by the Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei.  I love his art and have now seen it in a number of venues. Most of his art that I have seen is paintings.  This was all "sculptures" or other 3-D art, which was cool.

 Below is a picture of life jackets made to look like lotus flowers to represent the refugee crisis.  Unfortunately, we could not take picture of the rest of the art since it was in the museum.  

I wanted to go there to see the Klimt masterpieces again.  I had not seen many of them since early in the creation of this blog (one of the first ten posts!!).  I saw them when I had visited the Neue Gallery in New York City.  

 think this museum had the highest concentration of paintings on my "1001 paintings" ever -- three in one room! 

 The Klimts were stunning.  Seeing them so concentrated was fantastic.  You could easily compare and contrast and understand the flow of his work.  They were nicely laid out in the room too with ample space around them to make it an enjoyable viewing experience.  I really liked the painting of Judith.  I had never noticed that the "frame" was actually painted in.  I also had never noticed that she was holding a head.  It turns out the longer more accurate name is Judith and the head of Holofernes.  His use of the gold leaf was intricate and adds vibrancy to the painting.  

 They don't let you take a picture with the real thing, but they do provide another one for a selfie and/or a picture taken by your husband!!


The Belvedere was also focusing on Franz Joseph I with an exhibit, Franz Joseph: The Emperor and the Belvedere, while we were visiting the museum.  It had a number of paintings of the emperor and his wife.  It also highlighted all of the art that had been acquired during his reign.  

 We also really enjoyed walking around the grounds of the museum.  I bet it is beautiful in the summer too.



I do recommend that they get more bathrooms (I cannot believe I am highlighting this!), but it was three for an entire museum!

 We really enjoyed the museum -- definitely worth the stop and seeing the Klimts!

 Times visited: 1
Time in museum: 1 hr
Overall: A-
Location: Prinz Eugen-Straße 27, 1040 Wien, Austria

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cincinnati Art Museum

By -
Image
A couple of weekends ago, I dashed into the Cincinnati Art Museum to see the Treasures of the Spanish World exhibit.  The exhibit was created by the Hispanic Society and very c learly, the descriptions were written by the Hispanic Society.  The exhibit spanned the typical exhibit hall and then also one of the other halls sometimes used for exhibit too.   With my annual membership, I had free admission to the exhibit. The exhibits starts much further back than expected, which if I had read the description closely, I would have known.  It focuses on the holistic Iberian peninsula.  The exhibit is set up chronologically and has a mixture of art mediums.  The exhibit had descriptions of the art in both English and Spanish.  As i mentioned earlier, the descriptions were definitely written by the Hispanic Society as a few of them were quite complimentary about their collection and its possessions.   So I did end up taking a bunch of photos during the exhibit. A miniature of a cr
Read more

lower east side tenement museum

By -
to take advantage of the beautiful day in new york city, i thought i would try to take the lower east side tenement museum walking tour. i hustled down there and got there right in the nick of time. i have been to the lower east side museum for their tenement tours, but wanted to try this 1 1/2 hr walking tour, immigrant soles: a neighborhood walking tour . i saw some areas of the lower east side which i had never seen before. the tour guide was very good; he did a great job pointing out the interesting architecture making us think about what certain architecture features might mean. for example, a building with only three windows, what does that mean? answer: that it was meant to have a single family live there as opposed to twenty, since there was no partition splitting the building in two. he also brought up some of the different political tensions running through the LES that had not been mentioned in some of the other tours. perfect for a beautiful summer day. times v
Read more

Vatican Museum

By -
Image
After we were in St.  Peter’s Basilica, we ran over to the Vatican Museum .  While you may think Vatican City isn’t that big, it is about a 15-18 minute walk to the entrance of the Vatican museum.  We did buy tickets in advance.  It guaranteed us entrance without having to wait in line.  We bought tickets for right at opening since we had the crypt tour tickets for 11:30 AM.  What a mass of people.  All of the tours seem to get there right at 9 AM too.  We did push our way towards the front, which was allowed, but getting through the museum was crazy.  If I were to do it over again, I would have gotten them for after opening e.g., 10 AM or something like that.  While still a long queue if you had not pre-bought tickets, it seemed like the lobby was at least under control when we left. I knew we did not have a ton of time to dawdle in the museum even though we had about two hours in the  museum.  It sure did take a long time to navigate the tour groups.  We (more or less) foll
Read more