sandr020

The main founder of the Surrealist movement and writer of the Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924 was André Breton (1896-1966). According to Breton in 1924, the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud  (1856-1939) “very rightly brought his critical faculties to bear upon the dream. It is, in fact, inadmissible that this consider­able portion of psychic act­ivity”. Also Breton credited Freud’s ideas with discovering “a current of opinion that was finally forming and that the imagin­ation is perhaps on the point of reasserting itself, of reclaiming its rights”. So André Breton and Max Ernst were very knowledgeable about Freud's beliefs. They saw that Surrealism was the most popular modern art form because it was a special, dogmatic and theoretical art that revealed human emotional truths. The theory it illustrated, i.e Freud's, was true as well. Freud's conception of the unconscious and the importance of dreams en­c­ouraged painters, sculptors and writers to pay attention to thei...

The film “ Klimt and Schiele: Eros and Psyche, 1918-2018 - Scandals, Dreams, Obsessions in Vienna's Golden Age ” analysed turn-of-the-century Vienna art. The film guided viewers through the Albertina, Belvedere, Leopold, Freud , Kunsthistorisches and Wien Museums and through exhibitions of Klimt and Schiele’s works. The film retraced this extraordinary era: a magical moment for art, music and literature, in which new ideas circul­ated. Life took place in salons where artists, politicians and scientists met each other. Talented women like Alma Mahler-Werfel, Lina Loos or Bertha Zuckerkandl began to emancipate themselves. The Kunstschau/Art Show of 1908 was arranged by artists in the Gustav Klimt Group and coincided with celebrations held in Vienna for the 60th anniversary of Emperor Francis Joseph I’s reign. The artists were offered the use of vacant land, which had been designated for an eventual Konzerthaus, as an interim exhibition venue. In only a few months, Josef Hoff...

The film Woman in Gold , directed by Simon Curtis, was about the recovery of Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I 1907. Gustav Klimt 1862-1918 (Moritz Bleibtreu)’s finished portrait painting, made of gorgeous oil, silver and gold, took three years to complete. His 1907 painting, commission by the husband, had originally been titled Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I. It was the first of 2 port­raits that Klimt painted of Adele; then Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II in 1912. When Adele died in 1925, her 6 paintings by Klimt were not left to Austria. She spec­if­ied in her will that the paintings were to be left to her husband and asked that he donate them to the Austrian State Gallery upon his death, to be put on display in the prest­ig­ious Belvedere Palace . However Adele's husband, wealthy sugar magnate Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer 's own will stated that his estate, including the Klimt paintings, was to go to his heirs. But Ferdinand did not die until WW2, and by that tim...

Notable German art dealer Hild­ebrand Gurlitt (1895–1956) was the ­son of a famous art hist­or­ian, Cornelius Gurlitt I (1850–1938), and grandson of Louis Gurlitt (1812–1897), an important C19th landscape artist. Early in his car­eer in the 1920s, Hilde­brand worked as a museum dir­ector in Zwickau, where he tried to convince people of the merits of modern art. But he faced a right wing backlash and was dropped. In 1933 he moved to Hamburg where young Hildebrand tried to rebuilt his career as a modern art dealer, just as the Nazis rose to power. Hildebrand started to actively link himself with the Nazi goals, writing to the Propa­ganda Ministry to volunteer his skills as a leading expert in modern i.e degenerate art. He was sent with other dealers to act for the Nazis, with the task of acquiring works for the Führermuseum project. Hit­ler’s Special Art Comm­ission of Linz planned to create a super museum in his boyhood town, Linz, that would contain every important art work in the w...

The Economist Intelligence Unit is a British business providing forecasting and advisory services through research and analysis, including country, industry and management analyses world-wide. Plus, as examined in 2016, it has published an annual Global Liveability Ranking which began in 2004. The Unit ranks cities for their urb­an quality of life, based on assess­ments across five categories — stability, infrastructure, healthcare and culture, education and environment. With Melbourne winning the world title for the past seven years, it may come as a surprise to Australians that Vienna for the first time topped the EIU’s Global Liveability Index. The 2018 results were as follows: 1. Vienna Austria; 2. Melbourne Australia; 3. Osaka Japan; 4. Calgary Canada; 5. Sydney Australia; 6. Vancouver Canada; 7. Toronto Canada and Tokyo Japan; 9. Copen­hagen Denmark and 10. Adelaide Australia. Vienna The differences between the top 30 cities in this index were small. Vienna and Me...

Here is a blog post of mine, reposted from 23/12/2008 and now modified. Prof Peter Singer , born safely in Australia straight after the 1939-1945 war, wanted to get to know his late grandfather, David Oppenheim . This was a man who died in the war in 1943, before he could reach a safe place. Luckily for Singer, heaps of documents survived. His aunt, Doris Liffman, had studied some of the letter-based material years earlier for her university degree. These days I ask my students to read Pushing Time Away ( Ecco, 2003), but not because they are necessarily interested in Peter Singer’s task in discovering his own family history. Rather I want them to un­derstand Viennese Jewish intellectual life from the late C19th until 1933. Peter Singer's book with his grandparents' portraits A new golden age of building came to Vienna, based on the grac­­ious Ring­strasse which was created 1860-90: all the city’s great institutions were lo­cated there. Diff­er­ent from the churches and imperi...

The cultural and linguistic diversity of Australia's resident population has been reshaped over many years by migration. In 2015, 28.2% of the resident population was born over­seas (6.7 million persons). As would be expected from a major member of the British Commonwealth of nations, the greatest proportion of these migrants came from the United Kingdom (5%) and New Zeal­and (3%). And increasingly, migrants are arriving from China (2.0%), India (2%), the Philippines (1%) and Viet­nam (1%). The fastest rate of increase over this period was for people born in Nepal, Pakistan, Brazil, India and Bang­ladesh. As a result of this diversity, Pauline Hanson 's party,  One Nation,  has arisen as a strongly nationalist, right-wing and populist party in Australia. One Nation was founded in 1997, by then-member of the Conservative Party in Federal parliam­ent, Pauline Hanson. Dis-endorsement came before the 1996 federal election because of comments she made about Indigenous Australians,...

On 11th of October each year, the United Nations celeb­rate In­ternational Day of the Girl Child , emphasising the needs and challenges that girls face. So this year I was interested in looking over my own posts on Fanny Hensel (1805–47), Felix Men­delssohn ’s sister, compos­er and under-valued musical advisor. Unfort­unately I didn’t find very much. However it did get me onto a totally different search: for Maria Anna Mozart (1751–1829) aka Nannerl, Wolf­gang Amadeus Mozart (1756-91)’s older sister. They were the children of musician and composer Leopold Mozart and Anna Maria Pertl of Salzburg. Maria Anna was taught harpsichord by her father Leopold. So they enjoyed a great childhood, indulging their musical creat­iv­ity and creating their own musical world. In fact Leopold took the two children to tour the most cultural cities across Europe, perform­ing together as child prodigies. Acc­ord­ing to all reports, the youngsters impressed both audiences and critics. But it was possible...

Art historians often cite rabbinical rulings against all Jewish art in the Middle Ages. But any such restrictions were limited to the geog­raph­­ic community where each ruling was given!! And in any case, they were no longer applicable by the C19th. Even better, national art schools and academies formally opened their doors to Jewish students in the C19th, in Britain, Italy, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Romania etc. Talented Jewish artists emerged. Moritz Oppenheim (1800-82), Solomon Hart (1806–81), Jozef Israels (1824–1911), Alphonse Levy (1843-1918), Maurycy Gottlieb (1856-79), Solomon J Solomon (1860–1927), Samuel Hirszenberg (1865-1908), Boris Schatz (1867-1932) and Ephraim Lilien (1874–1925) were certainly creating worthy careers for them­selves. Max Liebermann (1847-1935) was regarded as a pioneer of modern artistic dev­elopment. But in my opinion, the most import­ant of all C19th Jewish art­ists was Hungarian-born Is­­idor Kaufmann (1853-1921). Young Kaufmann studied...

I’ll soon be seeing Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story , directed by Alexandra Dean, at the Jewish Film Festival. The festival programme says: Known for her striking looks and electric onscreen persona, Lamarr’s fans never knew she possessed such a beautiful mind. An Aust­rian Jewish émigré who acted by day and drew mechanical and electronic inventions by night, Lam­arr came up with a secret communication system to help the Allies to beat the Naz­is. Bomb­shell is for lovers of history, film and science. But locating the truth about her life was tricky - thanks,  Encyclopaedia of World Biography . Hedwig Kiesler (1913–2000) was born in Vienna. Her parents were Jewish and cultivated; her father Emil Kiesler was a Bank of Vienna director and her mother Gertrud Lichtwitz a concert pianist from Budapest. Hedwig attended schools in Vienna then was sent to a Swiss finishing school. After an unsuccessful audition with her acting teacher and stage director, Max Rein­hardt , Hedwig moved i...

The Early Years Richard Bruno Heydrich  was director of  Halle Conserv­atory of Music and Theatre which he had founded in 1901. He comp­osed and performed choral works, songs, orchest­ral works and operas a la Richard Wag­ner. Heydrich’s wife Elisabeth taught piano at the Halle Conservat­ory and Elisabeth’s father had been the director of the  Dresden Roy­al Conservatory . Clearly the Heydrich family was a very culturally and financially import­ant family! Reinhard Heydrich  (1904-42) was born in Halle NW of Leipzig, son of Richard and Elisabeth. Music was an integral part of family life; the young lad dev­eloped a passion for the violin and cello. He excelled in science and athletics at the Reform-gymnasium. But he was whipped by his mother and bullied by children for his high voice and possible Jewish ancestry. Too young to fight in WWI, Heydrich got lucky. WW1 ended with Ger­m­any's defeat in 1918. In Feb 1919, strikes and clashes between left and right-wingers to...