Seeing while just dully walking along in Vienna
Museum Hours, 2012, by Jem Cohen
“About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well, they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.”
Musée des Beaux Arts by W.H. Auden, 1938
These opening lines of Auden’s great poem are invoked by a museum guide at the Kunsthistorisches Museum’s Bruegel Room in the film “Museum Hours,” 2012, by Jem Cohen. The movie is a wonderful cinematic work of art, quiet, meditative, and observant, about the relationship between a museum guard and a Canadian woman who comes to Vienna in the winter to be with her hospital-bound relative. She comes to the Kunsthistorisches Museum to while away the time between her hospital visits, and there she strikes up a friendship with the guard after he assists her in her struggle with a Vienna map trying to figure out how to get to the hospital the first time. There is hardly a story to this film. There is no violence, no suspense, no romance.
The Peasant Wedding by Pieter Bruegel, the Elder, 1567
The Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel, the Elder, 1563
The story is a mere vehicle for something more. It’s about Vienna, in a small way, a city that W.H. Auden lived near for the last ten years of his life, attending the opera, and probably visiting the Kunsthistorisches Museum and its room of Bruegel’s paintings many times. It’s about the Kunsthistorisches Museum with its amazing picture galleries, the best of which is the Bruegel Room with such intriguing works like: The Tower of Babel, 1563; Hunters in the Snow, 1565; Massacre of the Innocents, 1530-1565; and The Peasant Wedding, 1567. There are collections of 16th-century Venetian painting (Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto), 17th-century Flemish painting (Peter Paul Rubens, Sir Anthony Van Dyck) -- all fleshy and sensuous concoctions of myth and Christian religion -- and masterpieces by Vermeer and Rembrandt. The guard, Johann, a peaceful and thoughtful man, talks about the Rembrandt to Anne, the Canadian woman, while they sit beside Anne’s comatose relative. The movie image is a detail of Rembrandt’s self-portrait displaying his eye that disappears into dark bluish shadow. There are beautiful Egyptian sculptures, and one sarcophagus shows an erect penis, which becomes Johann’s meditation on sex in the museum paintings.
But this is only the sub-text. The film is about seeing life and pleasure and meaning acquired when we look with discernment. Museum Hours is about what we learn to see in a museum, and how we can use the knowledge acquired of detail, color, and composition to see the world around us as we or “someone else is eating or opening a window or just walling dully along.” The film shifts between images of the museum, its collection, the people visiting, including lovers and bored teenage boys slouched in chairs playing with their cell phones, and places in Vienna, the hospital interior, and a pub party.
The museum guide talking about Bruegel speaks of his observations of the human condition, where there may be joy or suffering going as the theme of his paintings, but there is something else, a keen depiction of vitality, whether it be crowds of people moving to and fro, despicable acts, or ordinary uncouth behavior. In the Peasant Wedding, Bruegel employs a diagonal from the two servers carrying a door leaf covered with wedding cakes that slices across the picture plane past the rowdy guest at a long table to the mob trying to push into the room, which provides a context and frame for the plump bride sitting at the wedding table, a large green cloth hanging behind her, as she makes a knowing bemused smile. We can recall this as the film displays images of Viennese people milling about sidewalk sale of junk, picking over old shoes, magazines, and other bric-a-brac. A yellowish cracked painting of a woman half ripped from its frame is propped up in a box while the snow trickles down.
A self-assured man taking part in the tour of the Bruegel room remarks to the guide that Bruegel “doesn’t rub or noses in dirt like modern artists.” The guide demurs. She states that Bruegel rubbed our nosed in humanity. Pointing to a small detail in The Tower of Babel, she shows us a man squatting at the edge of the water taking a shit. “Bruegel is an amazing link between the medieval and the modern,” she continues and closes her remarks with the reference to Auden’s poem “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.”
The film supplies many exquisite images of the places in and around Vienna from: the dripping I.V. in the hospital, the images of Johan sipping a beer in a local pub, where a wall is covered with small photographs of patrons; two laborers working on a scaffold at a building under construction applying something to the base of two windows – the color of their clothes is striking against the grey grid of the scaffold and the greenish grey of the wall, the stone-enclosed waterway where a flock of birds takes off as a few cars pass along the neighboring road, the old woman walking up a curving path by a road illuminated by the red tail lights of stopped automobiles, and a exquisite green field that slopes down toward the camera as Johann and Anne walk across its upper edge. All the exterior shots are infused with the dull but luminous winter light of Austria.
Leopold Museum 2012 with Naked Men (Nackte Manner) Exhibition
In 2012, the same year as the release of the film “Museum Hours,” my wife and I made a brief visit to Vienna just before Christmas. I was interested in the museums that showed the work of Egon Schiele: The Leopold Museum, Gustav Klimt: The Belvedere, and Albert Durer: The Albertina. None of these museums disappointed me. The Leopold Museum had an exhibition at that time called “Naked Men” (Nackte Manner in German). “Naked Men” was a surprise and somewhat controversial. Posters of three naked football players with their penises prominently displayed advertising the exhibition caused some stir, but not enough to close the exhibition, which displayed naked men in art from ancient times to the contemporary, nor to get the posters removed. One video tape made by a woman disguised as a man in a Turkish bath, I found colossally boring. A bunch of old men with big bellies wandered around the bath doing nothing particularly interesting. My favorite thing was the giant cutout of a naked man in front of the museum. I took a photo of a man walking past. reflecting on this today, I think of the line from Auden’s poem: “… while someone dully walks along.”
A Christmas Market in Vienna, 2012
The Kunsthistorisches Museum was previously unknown to me, but on the following afternoon my wife and I made a visit, since it was attributed to be Vienna’s biggest art museum. We discovered the Bruegel room, and I was completely stunned. In this one room were most of the Bruegel paintings I knew about and have loved since I was young. They are everything that the movie claims them to be, modern yet medieval, infinitely interesting, and sophisticatedly composed. The detail is astounding. The paintings make you stop and ponder, and they make you more aware of the beauty and meaning in the ordinary. We left the museum and walked into a Christmas Market in the Plaza of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the same market that briefly appears in the movie. Strolling through the collection of vendor huts, I came to understand how the winter light in Vienna -- so diffuse, so even --, makes colors and objects special in a way totally different from the bright sun and shadow of California and Greece. The softness creates an intimacy, and a quiet holding of edges, where one thing is not separated from another but part of a larger composition. I marveled at a display of candy in a shop front window not far from the Christmas Market. The colors were vivid and sensuous, yet part of a crowd all fleshy and packed for human desire.
A Candy Store Window in Vienna, 2012
Vienna is not only a city famous for its music, but it is a city of great visual interest. The streets and buildings of this former Hapsburg dynasty capitol hold together as a cohesive whole. Perhaps this is because Vienna was where the aristocracy and higher classes made their homes to be close to the center of power. The buildings are mostly of a uniform five story height and the coloration a subtle variation of yellow, grey, and white hues. Everywhere you look there are sculptures attached to the buildings. Unlike American city centers that have declined and been subject to fearsome urban renewal, Vienna has evolved over time. Mass transit in the form of subways and trolleys has kept the car in check. An area of city near the St. Stephen’s Cathedral has become for pedestrians only. The city is scrupulously clean. I saw no trash abandoned on the streets. What I did see was shopkeepers sweeping in front of their stores and busily washing their windows.
The center of Vienna was not bombed in World War II, which preserved it character. However, this doesn’t mean there is no memory of this dreadful past, a past that saw the devastation of Austrian Jewry. In the pedestrian district, my wife and I wandered into a plaza marked by the most moving memorial to the Holocaust I have ever seen. Rachel Whitehead, the British artist, created a somber rectilinear block of concrete that is rendered as a stack of books. In this plaza, the monument is not jazzy or hysterical, but rather presents a quiet contemplative memorial to something awful. This is beautiful and creates meaning. Johann and Anne visit this place in the film, and as I look back on my visit, I recall the photo I made and the Auden poem in which he said, “About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters.” Rachel Whitehead has made an old master, and yet life goes on. In my photograph I captured a person photographing something else.
Rachel Whitehead’s Holocaust Memorial in Vienna, 2012
Since I was last in Vienna, ten years have passed. Vienna is a great city to see the work of new and old masters: Schiele, Klimt, Bruegel, Durer, who knew the human position and who knew about suffering. Look at the painful expressions of Egon Schiele in his drawings and paintings in the Leopold Museum. You will see the pain of existence and the gift to make art out of sorrow. View in the Belvedere Gustav Kimt’s sensuous Secessionist painting that glitter with joy. Then sense the horrors of Vienna’s past memorialized in Rachel Whitehead’s unreadable concrete library below the soft diffused light of the sky, where Jews, the people of the book, were exterminated by the evil that tracks all humans. Look and see the descendants of Bruegel living their live and eating sweets Explore the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the Belvedere, and the Albertini, packed with Durer’s precise efforts. You won’t be disappointed. Walking spritely or dully you will discover a special place. I plan to go again someday.
