"Vienna - Berlin the Art of two Cities"

[caption id="attachment_1525" align="alignleft" width="300"] copyright: Unteres Belvedere, Bildergalerie[/caption]

Great Exhibition at Vienna´s Belvedere Palace

Visual Arts of Vienna and Berlin until the middle of June

Many travelers have both cities on their list and obviously Berlin and Vienna are famous for their creative atmosphere and cultural activities ever since. Never the less the outcome differs a lot. Until the middle of June you can visit a collection of historic paintings in one of Vienna´s most beautiful sights.

This rich collection of paintings takes the viewer into the period ranging from the turn of the century to the 1930s. With their gaze influenced by a multitude of clichés, the habitants of both big cities have observed each other - driven by curiosity, but also scepticism.

While Vienna was the capital of a multi-ethnic empire, Berlin was the up-and-coming metropolis of a united Germany. The old Habsburg Empire Vienna, the city of elegance opposed to Berlin, a dynamic metropolis, with a modern appearance. These are two cities that could not be more different but still had so much in common.

From Vienna Secession to Käthe Kollwitz

Following the founding of the Vienna Secession, in 1897, a similar artists’ association was established in Berlin. As different as both groups of artists were, they shared a similar international outlook in their opposition of the historicist-classicist traditions. In Berlin, this was reflected primarily in French impressionism, whereas in Vienna artists strived more for the total artwork. With his psychological portraits Oskar Kokoschka attracted the interest not just of the Viennese. Expressionism was certainly rampant in both cities.

While in Berlin artists compensated for the horrors of war with playful subversive force of Dada, in the economically weaker city of Vienna artists took up various variants of modernism.The spectrum extended from the German artist George Grosz who turned to big-city life with his critical-belligerent imagery, to Christian Schad who lived in both Vienna and Berlin and was known for his melancholy images of man, all the way to the Viennese chemist Franz Sedlacek with his magical imagery. They can all be seen in the exhibition, along with eminent works by artists such as Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, Raoul Hausmann, Max Liebermann, Max Oppenheimer and Egon Schiele. The Weber series by the German socialist artist Käthe Kollwitz captures the great misery in which the poor in both Vienna and Berlin lived.

source: wien.at