Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
glass lift ascends over 70m into the cupola for a close-up view. In Lower Austria his
work adorns Stift Melk and Klosterneuburg.
Daniel Gran, the third in the triumvirate of baroque fresco greats, also studied in Italy,
but unlike the works of Troger and Rottmayr his style reined in the most extravagant fea-
tures and offered a foretaste of neoclassicism - perhaps best illustrated by his ceiling
fresco in the Nationalbibliothek (National Library) in Vienna. As fate would have it,
Gran was the son of a court chef for Leopold I. But it was his talent, not his connections,
that made his fresco in the library above the apotheosis of Leopold's son, Kaiser Karl VI,
one of his most important legacies to the style and age.
The Expressionists
Tulln is a sleepy town slaked by the waters of the Danube River. It has a couple of inter-
esting churches and the Minoritenkloster (Minorite Seminary), which each year presents
a new exhibition on modern art. Tulln was also the home of Austria's most important ex-
pressionist painter, Egon Schiele (1890-1918), and a museum there tells the story of his
life through a large collection of his paintings and sketches. Other works are held in Aus-
tria's foremost museum for expressionist art, the Leopold in Vienna's MuseumsQuartier,
where Schiele's art is hung alongside the expressionists Oskar Kokoschka, Klagenfurt-
born Herbert Boeckl, as well as Gustav Klimt, who worked in a number of styles.
Egon Schiele
In his day, Schiele was one of the country's most controversial artists. He left Tulln in
1906 to attend the Vienna's Akademie der Bildenden Künste (Academy of Fine Arts),
one of Europe's oldest academies - and famous, incidentally, for having turned down
Adolf Hitler in 1907. Schiele cofounded a group in Vienna known as the Neukunstgruppe
(New Art Group) and around that time his work began to resonate with the public. Al-
though he was very strongly influenced by one of the leading forces behind the Secession
movement and art nouveau in Austria, Gustav Klimt, he is much more closely associated
with expressionism than Klimt. Indeed, much of Klimt's early work had revivalist fla-
vours before he broke away from the conservative art establishment of the Künstlerhaus
Wien in 1897 and moved into art nouveau.
Sigmund Frued, Vienna's famous psychologist, apparently felt no affinity with expres-
sionists like Schiele, preferring classical art and its neoclassical incarnations, but both
Freud and Schiele were bedfellows in one way: the concept of the erotic. While Freud
