Our second day in Vienna starts well. A light breakfast in the hotel, a stroll down to the railway station and the underground to Stephensplatz. Today's plan involves visitng the Albertina, which our guidebook tells us is home to works by several of our favourite artists. In addition there's a special exhibition featuring Matisse, another of our faves.
We make our way to the gallery and join the queue for tickets. When we reach the head of the queue, we see three things. First, the price - 11 Euros, about £10. Second, a card saying that much of the main collection is out on loan. Third, the Matisse exhibition is closed for the 28th and 29th October - our only two days in Vienna! Given that they still want to charge 11 euros to see what's left, we decide to give it a miss. At the risk of sounding like smug globetrotters, we had the same problem with items out on loan at the Guggenheim in New York and the Musee D'Orsay in Paris. It might make financial sense for galleries to loan their pieces to other galleries but there should surely be some compensation to their customers.
Our plan B is to visit another gallery across town, the MUMOK which also contains some great modern masterpieces, according to our guidebook. After a short ride on the metro and a longish walk, we arrive at MUMOK around 11:30 to find that while the gallery opens every day at 10AM, on Mondays it doesn't open till 2PM! Time for Plan C.
We make our way to the gallery and join the queue for tickets. When we reach the head of the queue, we see three things. First, the price - 11 Euros, about £10. Second, a card saying that much of the main collection is out on loan. Third, the Matisse exhibition is closed for the 28th and 29th October - our only two days in Vienna! Given that they still want to charge 11 euros to see what's left, we decide to give it a miss. At the risk of sounding like smug globetrotters, we had the same problem with items out on loan at the Guggenheim in New York and the Musee D'Orsay in Paris. It might make financial sense for galleries to loan their pieces to other galleries but there should surely be some compensation to their customers.
Our plan B is to visit another gallery across town, the MUMOK which also contains some great modern masterpieces, according to our guidebook. After a short ride on the metro and a longish walk, we arrive at MUMOK around 11:30 to find that while the gallery opens every day at 10AM, on Mondays it doesn't open till 2PM! Time for Plan C.
Our fallback position involves a visit the Kunsthaus Wien, a gallery designed by and housing the work of Friedensreich Hundertwasser, a 20th-century artist and architect whose name was vaguely familiar to us, although we couldn't quite work out why.
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| He's very good at toilets |
Hundertwasser is a little like Gaudi, the Barcelona architect whose buildings are curved and patterned with mosaics and stained glass. Hundertwasser's gallery is all of this - uneven floors, wonky windows, beautiful tiled patterns on every surface. We soon discover why his name sounded familiar; on our trip to New Zealand in 2006 we visited Kakoura, where they have a public lavatory which he designed. It was very similar to the loos here. He has also beautified an incinerator in Vienna and customised a church in Magdburg among many other projects.
His art is distinctive, almost childlike in its simplicity but skilful and evocative. He's our new favourite artist, not least because his gallery was open on a Monday!
After getting our cultural fix we headed for the world-famous Ferris Wheel, as seen in The Third Man. It's a venerable institution, about 100 years old. We shared our "pod" with a British family who live in Munich - our next destination - and chatted about what to see and do there, while enjoying the sunset over Vienna.
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