In Vienna, Taking Art And Culture to the Extreme

Our daughter Alix, 16, and son Stephen, 11, got a kick out of the Haus der Musik, an interactive museum where we composed our own waltzes electronically and conducted -- virtually -- the Vienna Philharmonic on a big screen. The second violinist harangued us in German for our sub-par performances.

After that were quick tours of the beautifully refurbished Albertina Museum, which featured a special exhibit of Marc Chagall's Bible paintings, and the Schatzkammer, a Hofburg museum devoted to the valuables of the Imperial Treasury. We finished off our by-the-guidebook tour with the Schoenbrunn Palace, the Habsburgs' spectacular summer residence on the outskirts of the city. The palace has 1,400 rooms, but we toured only 22 -- including the Hall of Mirrors, where Mozart performed for royalty when he was 6, and the fabulous Grand Gallery.

By then, we were eager to turn our attention to the Museum Quarter, which turned out to be the perfect counterpoint to Vienna's more traditional offerings. Behind the walls -- designed by famed Viennese architect Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach in the early 1700s -- is a sprawling complex of modern and experimental museums; airplane- hangar-size exhibition halls for the annual Vienna Fair and contemporary shows and exhibits; the children's museum; and quartier21, a cultural cluster. It houses artists publishing magazines, producing neon art and rescuing long-forgotten Austrian pop music back to the 1950s. One tenant collects and displays computer keyboards as art; another is a mathematics professor who explores the relationship between math and art.

We started our day by peeking into the studios of Puls TV, an independent regional television news station that operates on the grounds, then spent some time watching young kids making pottery and exploring a mock archaeological dig at the Zoom-Kindermuseum.

Then it was on to the Leopold, the new home for the vast modern art collection of Viennese ophthalmologist Rudolf Leopold, which is now owned by Austria. The collection of well over 5,000 pieces includes a large number of paintings by path-breaking Viennese expressionist Schiele, who died at 28 during the 1918 flu epidemic, as well as works by Gustav Klimt -- although not "The Kiss," which is at the nearby Belvedere Palace.

The Leopold also contains important objects from the turn-of-the-19th-century Austrian arts and crafts movement as well as works of ancient Chinese and Japanese art.

During the 1970s, a debate raged over whether the site, which in recent years had been used for trade fairs and exhibitions, should be turned into a cultural center or a more commercial enterprise, such as a mall or hotel complex. Once that argument was settled, battles in the 1980s and 1990s centered on the size of the project. Critics, worried that the megacomplex would clash with nearby historic landmarks, forced repeated reductions in size and successfully barred efforts to build a tall column or tower that would have been visible from afar and become the symbol of the Museum Quarter.

At the same time, Vienna was becoming younger and fresher in its outlook, and more creative. Today, Waldner argues, the city is "more cutting edge than Berlin or Paris." The MQ complex, jointly owned by Austria and the City of Vienna, eventually opened in 2001, but the controversy didn't end. "Some folks still want this as only a museum-sanctioned art space," says Waldner. "We interpret culture much more broadly."

Even the "young lava" (anthracite-colored basalt) used for the exterior of the Museum of Modern Art is designed to convey a sense of freshness and vitality. The museum's collection of 5,500 works is built around a core of New Realism, Pop Art and Photorealism, and includes works by Picasso, Russian expressionist Wassily Kandinsky, Italian futurist Giacomo Balla and Dutch abstractionist Piet Mondrian. While we were there, the museum was featuring a show by John Baldessari, a California native and leader of the conceptual art movement who in 1970 burned all his paintings done between 1953 and 1966 to demonstrate his move to the dialogue between images and texts.

The most startling work, of course, is Viennese Actionism, billed as Austria's most important contribution to avant-garde artistic expression. These artists of the 1960s rejected traditional genres of painting, drawing and sculpture. Otto Muehl, for example, found expression in tearing apart, smashing and tying up materials. Gunter Brus used his own body and that of his wife, Ana, as the canvas for his paintings. Many of the artists freely used blood and excrement to make their points and break taboos.

The point of all these works is probably best summed up by one of the "text paintings" hanging in the exhibit that declares: "I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art."

Eric Pianin is the congressional editor of The Post. Laurie McGinley is an assistant Washington bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal.