After explaining the finer points of the works of Paul Klee, Alberto Giacometti and Rene Magritte on the upper floors of Vienna's Museum of Modern Art, our enthusiastic young guide tried to prepare us for a cultural jolt as our elevator descended to the basement.
Awaiting us were the masterworks of Viennese Actionism, a movement that scandalized staid Vienna in the 1960s and 1970s. One artist, Hermann Nitsch, created a work by hanging a disemboweled lamb in front of a linen sheet splattered with blood. Mercifully, the original was long gone, but it was preserved in a series of photographs. In another creation, "Endurance Test," artist Gunter Brus performed various acts of self-mutilation while dressed in women's stockings and garters. Our guide assured us that the artists had something profound and significant to say.
Still, as we gazed at a video monitor showing artists painting the nude bodies of women, we were glad that our two children were across the street at a cafe.
The modern art museum is part of an extraordinary new complex in Vienna called the MuseumsQuartier Wien that is causing a stir in the art world.
We caught our first glimpse of the Museum Quarter as our tram rounded the bend near Museumsplatz, in the heart of the historic Austrian capital, during a trip to Central Europe in mid-March. We'd heard about Vienna's brash new art and cultural center -- and the many battles that surrounded its creation -- and were eager to see the upstart complex.
After only four years of operation, the Museum Quarter has become one of the world's 10 largest and most popular museum and exhibition venues, rivaling the likes of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Pompidou Center in Paris. One critic wrote that the cultural megaplex, with almost 650,000 square feet of space, has bridged the gap between the imperial relics of the Habsburgs and the edgy art movements that have emerged in Vienna in recent decades.
More than 2.6 million people flock to the MQ every year, securing Vienna's reputation as one of the cultural crossroads in Europe. The complex's director, Wolfgang Waldner, calls it a prime example of a "third place" -- a 21st-century hybrid of hangout and multi-sensory cultural experience. "The idea is to create places in the center of cities that are culturally charged," he told us in an interview. "People come because of the atmosphere."
Yet the peach-colored baroque facade of the former Habsburg imperial stables, across the street from the Maria Theresien Platz with its gargantuan art and natural history museums, gives little hint of what lies in the courtyards behind it.
The complex boasts two of Europe's newest and most important modern art museums -- the Museum of Modern Art (Moderner Kunst) and the Leopold Museum, which both opened in September 2001. The block-shaped Leopold, sheathed in gleaming white Bulgarian limestone, houses the the country's largest collection of Austrian masters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including Richard Gerstl, Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. The Museum of Modern Art, constructed with basalt lava and dominated by a 115-foot-high atrium, holds one of Europe's biggest collections of modern art, including the blood-splattered Viennese protest art.
It seems fitting that the MQ, which is as much a social and cultural oasis for artists and young people as a museum and exhibition center, has rhythms much different than its tradition-bound neighbors in this citadel of conservatism. Throughout the spring and summer, thousands of people gather every day and night at sidewalk cafes in the courtyard, including many who don't actually visit the major museums or the children's center, called Zoom-Kindermuseum. The vast majority of the visitors are locals, and many come back repeatedly, as we would, to soak up the atmosphere, if not the art exhibits.
"This is our big success -- that we created an island within a city," Waldner said. "It's an irony to hide it behind baroque walls, but it works."
For much of our stay in Vienna, we followed the path of first-time visitors -- beginning with a trip to see the famous but less-than-exciting Lipizzaner stallions in the magnificent Spanish Riding School. The riding school is part of the Hofburg, the winter palace of the Habsburgs, rulers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1918.
