Whipped Cream then Hitler’s Bathroom «

Whipped Cream then Hitler’s Bathroom

Tuesday 7th July 2015

We’re building up to the full Vienna experience. At last whipped cream loomed. But on the culture front we were not yet at full throttle. Only a Frans Hals and a single Klimt remained in the sieve when we came to drain the first full day. Reggie and I enjoyed the breakfast panoply in the hotel Altstadt. I had that wet muesli stuff that’s got a name. There was trouble with the butter getting too warm owing to the little glass dishes supplied to put it in being just out of the dishwasher. But I had an amazing brainwave re: that problem the following day. We also found that afternoon cake service in the hotel (very modern cakes) went on beyond the alloted time. Several times, when in a museum, we shrieked, ‘We’re too late for cake in the hotel salon.’ But we weren’t. That first morning in Vienna we entered the Kunsthistorisches Museum (yes, it’s really called that: it means Art History Museum). It’s a very brown building inside. Late 19th century. The Habsburgs phoned up and said, ‘Bring round 3 million miles of Imperial Building.’ Reggie seemed to rather like it at first but he had to rest after climbing the stairs in the café. Then we undertook the Dutch and Germanic wing. I don’t think Reggie really liked the Bruegels, which are the highlight of the whole museum really. Later he said he couldn’t have poultry in a painting and I suspect there are poultry in the Bruegels. Of course they show peasant life but I made a special effort to find them fascinating. Bruegel always obscured the main subject of his painting so we spent ages trying to work out where in one of them the conversion of St Paul on the Road to Damascus was going on only to realise that we were looking at ‘Village Festival Scene.’ The St Paul picture was on the adjacent wall. The knockout though was the Frans Hals, whom I’d always understood to be a chocy box painter but Reggie said not. There was a Vermeer but we’ve seen all that before. The Frans Hals was completely new although old.

We lunched in a palm house and there was Simeon Bond, also arrived from London for Harry Rollo’s perf and staying in an Airbnb despite a fortune extending as far as the eye can see. One felt completely connected and that really Vienna wasn’t in foreign at all. Everyone was there. At 2pm Harry Rollo gave a discussion to some students. This took place actually inside the Emperor Franz Joseph’s horrible new back gate to the Hofburg built in 1897. The House without Eyebrows was put up opposite it by Adolf Loos as a deliberate insult and Harry said that the Emperor never went out of his back gate again for the horror of the House without Eyebrows. But Reggie said the back gate was ‘rather good.’ Anyway, we were Harry’s Suite for the big entrance after miles of grubby university corridors to the room where the students were. And Harry gave a discussion about his perfs. ‘It’s all totally frivolous in a terrible way,’ he said which is exactly how I feel about my own life when it is considered as a work of Art. Then we processed out, me, Reggie and Mercury, Mr Kitten making up the Suite. It may have been at this point that I first spied the entrance to the Sisi Museum but our destiny then was a swirly whipped cream café where swirly whipped cream in swirls had been applied to simply everything. After that I would have lain down, but Reggie spurred me up a ramp to the Albertina. The contents of this museum were shown in London after the War and seen by the Gay Mother. There was a delicious suite of near edible rococo rooms. Harry told us to look out for the arsenic wallpaper. But we couldn’t understand why all the Dürers were facsimiles. Then there was the exhibition of photographs by Lee Miller. I thought she was a glamour person so did she end up in Hitler’s bath straight after the War? Her photographic record of the death-camps, suicides, reprisals and devastation – well, words can’t describe… there’s an astonishing, ruthlessness about them, ruthless towards the viewer. I couldn’t believe that children were allowed to see them nor that they were published originally in Vogue. Nevertheless we forged on to the Batwinger Collection, now comprising a large part of the Albertina. The Batwingers must have been very rich indeed but if only they’d bought fewer pictures of better quality. Clearly they were determined to have something by every artist of the 20th century. Finally we came to the collection of Paul Klee work which had belonged to the man who invented the Pill. ‘I knew him,’ Reggie declared. Inventing the Pill was not enough. He wished to be known for artistic endeavour as well so was a wheeny bit tiresome.

When we got back to the hotel, cake service was still in progress. Reggie had that cake cover off in no time, I can tell you. I can’t remember if it was that afternoon or the next day that I saw a painting of Sisi, showing Sisi as she actually was in life.