Folk Museum, Ethnicity Lecture, and Belvedere

Wednesday 08/09/06

Today after our normal lecture we went to the Folk Museum in Vienna. They had a collection of cultural artifacts from the countryside of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, including things like clothing, architecture, furniture, and artwork. I thought it was interesting to see the high degree of craftsmanship involved with each work to make unique pieces. While I was studying several of the pieces I noticed how irregular they seemed. I am used to a society with highly developed tools and an industrialized system for creating uniform products. It was fascinating to see things made using more “primitive” tools that must have taken much more time, patience, and skill. I also really liked looking at the models of different homes and noticing similar idiosyncrasies. They obviously put a lot of time and effort into their work, but their products appear quite irregular. This made me wonder about the value of regularity. Do household items work better when they are symmetrical or regularly sized? Is our obsession with uniformity merely a product of industrialization? For example, uniform products may be associated with the factory process which was a product of modern processes. If the society considered modern as better, than regularity would be seen as better.

Today after our normal lecture we went to the Folk Museum in Vienna. They had a collection of cultural artifacts from the countryside of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, including things like clothing, architecture, furniture, and artwork.

It was also neat to see in the museum all of the many cultures we had discussed during the lecture this morning. Today during lecture we finally got an abbreviated history of the Austria/Hungarian Empire’s dominance in Europe. It was really cool to see the family tree for the Habsburgs and how the individual people married and expanded the Empire based on the contemporary map. I’m a very visual learner and so seeing the map and family tree really helped put the different groups into perspective for me. I thought it was also very interesting to see how the Habsburgs annexed each component of the monarchy and how those components had “historical claims” to their self determination. For example, the kingdom of Hungary became part of the monarchy in the 1500’s because of marriage between their ruling families. They had been their own kingdom for over 500 yrs! That’s more than twice as long as the United States has been a country. If a different country tried to annex us, we would be very upset, let alone a country as well established as something like Hungary.

I was also interested by the differentiation between nation and state. In common usage these two words are interchangeable but they are actually different things. The nation is the people and culture whereas the state is just a political entity. The Habsburg government was merely a state and it was composed of many different nations. The concept of nation and state being the same was foreign to them. I think that originally nations and states were the same and so it made me wonder when the departure occurred and why it eventually failed. As a U.S. citizen I feel that different cultures should be able to peacefully and profitably coexist but the example of Austria seems to point to nation and state needing to be the same. Assimilation into the same “mainstream” culture for the state seems to be what kept the Empire together before its downward spiral. Perhaps diversity can exist as long as it is only a certain amount of deviation from the “mainstream” to function.

We also went to the Belvedere museum. After wading through more dying Jesus paintings, we found the museum section with the Klimt, etc. I enjoyed seeing the progression of art in the Impressionism period to the Post Impressionists like Van Gogh to the early works of Klimt. He used a lot of the techniques of the impressionists in many of his early landscapes. I noticed many of those techniques carried into some of his later works, such as the ground beneath the couple in The Kiss. Then to see the works of Kokoschka and Shiele; it was neat to see the progression. They used a lot of the almost surreal aspects of Klimt but made them thicker, darker, more dramatic, and more erratic. I think I like Klimt and Kokoschka better than Shiele. They tended to have more coherent thoughts and presentation that Shiele. I also didn’t understand why most of Shiele’s figures were so wraithlike and emaciated. Is it supposed to be a depiction of reality or is it symbolic of the starvation of their souls or did Shiele just have some kind of anorexic fetish? I’ll have to read more about him to try to understand.

One of my favorite pictures in the museum was the painting of the girl reading. The lighting was beautiful and the contrast of her light dress and face with her dark hair and eyes was very striking. It was a beautiful rendering of a (hopefully) timeless experience of a young girl enjoying a book. My whole family on my mother’s side loves to read. The picture could be me or my sister or my mother or my grandmother or my great grandmother or some hypothetical daughter I may have. It made me feel very connected to the history that we have been studying.