Michaelerkirche goes back to the 1200’s and looks it. Being from a country whose ancient history – as far as English-speaking people go – stretches back to Plymouth Rock, I have no local frame of reference. What is the 13th-century supposed to look like? Ancient and forbidding, I would think. Dark I would hope since, God only knows, the 18th-century is dark enough! Austere. That’s it exactly! Though I’d not hit upon this word, I seemed to understand these fusty old 1200’s with their unpainted stonework, their dankly disarranged furniture, their pointy architecture Baroque people re-shaped into effeminate s’s and chatty loop-de-loops. I would even say I got fairly comfortable in them, though it was nice to know that, waiting outside the door, was a tabloid newspaper with Paris Hilton’s picture on it. There were also distinctly Twenty-first century people milling about, in their Nikes, their Gucci bags, their ever-expanding sense of the old stuff you can’t see for love or money over in Lansing, Charlottesville, or Cambridge.
The crowning marvel of old-style statecraft (again, in the English-speaking world) was signed in 1215. When I thought of that, I had my context: I was walking in a place once occupied by folk for whom the Magna Carta was soundbite-new. That’s certainly as old a space, as conceived by European white men, as I’ve ever set foot in.
On a more “contemporary” note, it was in Michaelerkirche that Mozart’s as-yet unfinished Requiem was first performed. I’d heard it at Strathmore Hall just last year; by then, the score had been completed and it sounded pretty good.

I went to the Michaelerkirche for an art show that took place in a spacious, sub-basement gallery, accessible by stairs you don’t ever want to climb without somebody near you. The theme of the show was Death, and death has had its dominion in the sub-chambers of Michaelerkirche since the 1400’s, when well-to-do people could pay for a slot in the Michaelergruft, or “Main Crypt”, or have themselves buried underneath a slab in the church itself. (The practice of crypt burials was abolished in 1784 by Joseph II, who introduced the sensible notion that people decayed a helluva lot quicker if you put them in a sack and buried ‘em, sans coffin, in a plot of good, old-fashioned terra firma. People raised such a stink about it, however, that Joseph had to pull back and allow an optional coffin for those who were repelled at the thought of body-sack and old earth mingling.) My artist-friend, Stefan and three other colleagues had chosen to paint the dead in this particular place, not necessarily because they’re morbid people. On the contrary! These Michaelergruft dead have not completely deteriorated the way people do in an ordinary plot. Many have even have retained humanlike features that are uncomfortably close to ours. After all these years, they still looked like us.
The Michaelergruft is not the clammy place one might think it is, but, rather, a posthumous drying-kiln where you can put a dead body one century and know it will be fairly well-desiccated by the next. (Because of its slow-drying nature, this is a process the living has to take on faith – which is what one does around there.) In the numerous centuries that have elapsed since the bodies were encrypted, as it were, a satisfactory mummification has occurred, in which these bodies have retained their shape and features – but don’t stink! (Caution: if you’re a must-hater, you’ll probably consider them stinky.) Some of the bodies have popped out of their coffins and sit in the open contemplating eternity. If you’re of a mind, you can go up and touch their half-ripped waistcoats and bizarrely time-resistant hair. The livelier-looking corpses appear to smirk or grimace as they effortlessly hold their poses for you.
The art I would see was based on a keenly dispassionate analysis of the surface textures and, possibly, existential meaning of these bodies’ presence in the crypt. I think the iron-nerved men and women who thought nothing of confronting the dead in their work directly should be commended. They probably knew they were doing something that wouldn’t “play” in the marketplace, but like curious people everywhere, they didn’t give a damn about that and went for the experience itself. Stefan had invited me to come without providing me with a whole lot of background. He just talked about the place itself: how it had become a user-friendly place to both the living – who could go see the dead if they wanted to; and the dead – who were kept there for that purpose. He may have been concerned that my queasy American sensibilities would be offended and sought to appease them by means of pleasant obfuscations. If he was worried about that, he needn’t have been; they were absolutely fascinated.
I had not been to an exhibit of this type before. Art exhibits in the States are generally about the people who attend them rather than artist, artwork, or even the free food. (People who come to eat are interested in all the other people who have come to eat and wage little toothpick wars only among themselves; otherwise, they have nothing to offer and are hardly noticed.) High-profile galleries have a certain celebrity, of course, but in the Hierarchy of Celebrity Worship, art dealers are way, way down on the totem pole, next to famous anglers perhaps. What you go to see at an American art exhibit are The People, particularly those glittering sorts who might deign to brush by for a little culture. Should they choose to buy a little culture, they enter the rarefied world of art patronage and are idolized by just about everyone who either can’t afford to buy art or just can’t get enough of Other People – particularly Celebrity People - for trying.
The type of Serious Art Exhibit you see at colleges or among non-profit galleries is perfunctorily attended, mostly by artists, their spouses, their friends, and one newspaper critic who probably feels he or she is getting cheated all to hell. So they don’t count.
As I said, however, this exhibit was unique in that the people who had come way, way down to the church’s sub-basement seemed to want to see the artwork. This is a simple concept, but I’m not used to it being practiced. I think I must have experienced the culture shock that followed on a deeply physical plane. After the worst was over, I had to sit down for a moment and pull myself together. I felt fine in a few minutes – though I would never shake a sense of disconnectedness and didn’t try.
The serious people at this art exhibit may, in fact, not have been as serious as I thought because they were all speaking in German, a regrettable lapse I could not possibly, as the sole American, make up for by myself. They could have been talking about the sorts of things I always hear at American openings: what trips might be left before the New Year, minor ailments easily fixed by “tucking”; Mel Gibson’s latest foul-mouthed tirade. Perhaps everybody was just talking about Mel Gibson’s drinking problem as I stood there idealizing their chatter and elevating their shallow turn of mind.
But I don’t think so. After more serious milling, a casually dressed young lady motioned for us all to sit down. Those of us who had chairs obliged her. Everybody else tried to stand as inconspicuously as possible, as the Viennese are a people who don’t care to be seen as socially disobedient. I was one of these people myself and felt the dawning embarrassment around me.
She talked for a while about coming attractions: a film, a little “artist’s” talk, and browsing among the paintings afterwards. She then talked for a while longer about all sorts of things that drew an appreciative titter now and then, so it appeared that people were actually listening as they shifted in their chairs and sipped surreptitiously from the plastic cups they’d filled earlier on. Then she pointed to a screen and turned down the lights. A projector was flipped on and The Film – possibly a feature of every such event here in Vienna – began.
The Film showed some of the project members rooting about an artificially lighted dungeon that was coffin-strewn and arch-heavy. It was a low-ceilinged sort of place that had most of the people in The Film bending and ducking as they did things. In the first segment, a shaggy-bearded fellow drew skulls and other deathly appurtenances on a plain wooden coffin. He was one of the people who had been sitting up front with a tormented look about him. You don’t see a lot of artists like him in the U. S. anymore. They’ve cleaned up their act and gone into Marketing.
When The Film began, somebody patted this guy on the back. The person sitting next to him jabbed his ribcage. Another whispered something that was obviously intended to be funny directly into his ear. I thought the guy was going to hit the nearest person for a moment, but he couldn’t because he was still drawing his bones and skulls on the coffin and was completely full of the moment and himself. It was my first touch of Ego a la Wien. I’ll remember it always.
Another guy wanted to paint the bodies themselves. His chef d’oeuvre was a huge allegory that paired a corpse whose deeply-rutted skin recalled the surface of a dried lake-bed with a lithely beautiful young woman, who was presumably there to comfort it. The film showed the corpses only. The young woman was perhaps too shy to come out, damnit.
My friend Stefan was in The Film too, but he was too busy cutting up with the camera-man – and anybody else who happened to come by. His little dungeon was a jolly place where people might pass around the bottle and not get any work done that day. (In his work, Stefan was prolific and had done the dead up real proud.) It was in front of his painting of a death-disfigured lady that another lady said something I know I would have heard in America: “I like this as art, but I would never hang it on my wall!”
Some things just don’t play no matter where you are.
When The Film was over, the shaggy-headed artist was joined by one of his cleaner-cut colleagues and they half-read, half-enacted a terrible script somebody had written about art and something else; art and this other thing; art and your car; art and the shop around the corner; art and the postal service; art and the gross national income of Turkmenistan. (Stefan would relinquish his standing position to come over and ask me whether I was getting any of what they said; I said “Nada” without any profound sense of regret.) As they droned on, I noticed something else about the Viennese character that is tragically underdeveloped in America: intellectual stamina. These guys could talk a blue streak and hardly miss a breath! Yet as I looked at the audience, I saw it reflected right back. They were listening! This just doesn’t happen where I come from. I can make someone glassy-eyed by just intimating that I might start to get serious about some artistic nuance that might need glossing-up. And when I do, I can tell the moment at which this person ceases to follow me and just nods her raggedy doll-head until she can find an opportunity to excuse herself. These people were being subjugated and they were enjoying it – or giving every appearance of enjoyment without the benefit of a second glass.
When the symposium was finally over, people did what they generally do at the movies: they stretched like experienced yogis and headed for the wine-bar. But until that moment they were a drolly captive audience who got whatever humor there was to be had in all the art-jokes; paused respectfully as Major Points were being made; bent forward in their seats at obvious climaxes. They were not necessarily the old tweedy crowd you see at the non-profits. They were, in fact, an almost slovenly, and most definitely heterogeneous, crew.
The pictures were hung along two rows that ran the length of the room. Somebody had come up with the idea of suspending them by means of tiny filaments. So they dangled in front of us, part bauble and part image, displacing the notion that pictures have to be hanging flat against a wall. I rather liked the suspension effect. It shows the three-dimensional nature of a painting, which doesn’t get a lot of play in museums and galleries. If you’d wanted to, you could have pushed the paintings back and forth, like mobiles. I didn’t see anybody try that. An Interactive Painting would strike the Viennese as disrespectful.
During this final phase of the event, people filed solemnly past each painting. Intentionally or not, they imitated the funereal practice of filing past a dead body. Thus was the central metaphor “internalized” by a group of people who were quick to adapt their collective mood to the work itself. Glory be! These people are really staying with this thing!
Each artist had written a statement – and, in some cases, captions designed to shed light on either this particular body of work or the creative process generally. These, along with the paintings themselves, were respectfully considered and discussed with an invigorating sense of what they meant and how they organically connected to the artist’s imagination.
Granted, everybody might have all been saying “Eeeuuuuuwww!” very politely, but it was their fierce and fighting concentration that distinguished them from the type of American audiences I was accustomed to. These people were really trying. In Richmond, all but the diehards and toothpick warriors would have been outta there. The next day everybody would be on the phone with their friends telling them to stay away from that awful place, it’ll get you down so much you won’t know what to do with yourself. I swear, I don’t know what gets into people sometime. I guess they just want to be different.
A student of Odd Nerdrum’s had participated in the show. If there was any buzz, it was probably on account of him. His two highly creditable paintings certainly drew the most people. You could stretch matters and even say they were mobbed – though I wouldn’t know because I’ve never seen people get rowdy in front of any painting before. Not even when it’s textbook-famous and been made into ashtray bottoms. Taken all and all, paintings just aren’t sexy. And these particular paintings were dead in the water as sex magnets from the git-go
The crowd started heading back upstairs at a signal I failed to notice. Stefan, I and a girlfriend of his decided we wanted to stick around for a while and were escorted to an after-hours cell by the same young woman who’d been our Thoughtful Guide to the proceedings down below. We traipsed down ancient corridors hung with mediocre paintings of unhappy clerics and undignified saints. As one corridor dissolved into another, I had an Ah-ha! Experience I didn’t share: it was in places like this that a church put its B-stuff.
Once among the large and boisterous crowd, we all talked for a while about the same sort of things those over-eager artists were going on and on about onstage. The shaggy-headed guy played the hurdy-gurdy – a perfect instrument for him. Everybody else was still talking up a storm when I left.
It was a perfect evening in a perfect city. I would be on my way home the very next day.

Epilogue (Because I Want One)
You get accustomed to being in an old place with an almost disappointing ease of adjustment. After an hour or two at Michealerkirche, I could have been in a basement at an arts center in Northern Virginia. Well, not really. There were all those German gutturals flying around. And, of course, a whole roomful of death-centered paintings, which, if hung anywhere near Richmond, would cause a huge arts-funding exodus in the State of Virginia.
I must, however, defend the open-mindedness of a great old city in hosting an exhibit that would gripe the guts of most of us here. We live in a “life-affirming” culture that just happens to kill lots of people accidentally.
Of course, the Viennese are used to things being very old, in which case they’re not particularly bothered by the notion that everybody who is presently alive won’t be someday. In America, a keener sense or mortality wouldn’t hurt us even as we kill ourselves in all sorts of ways without knowing it. It might also lead to a certain history-conscious perspective that is long overdue. The typical Viennese crinkles his lips into a smile so drenched in irony that most of us could hardly look at it. This is the death-sense talking. It says: “We understand these things now.” It also makes allowances: “But don’t worry if you can’t.” But it insists on an eventual loss of innocence: “But you will. God willing, you will someday be as old as we are and you will know that death isn’t the worst thing that can happen to people.” Then a pause, as the crinkle refreshes itself: “Because death is everywhere here. It’s everywhere you are and look.” Then it gives a ghastly chortle: “And the strangest thing is, we like it. We really do. Ta-ta now.”

The National Gallery of Art
October 1 – December 31, 2006

At the risk of philistinism, let me say that John Constable has always been one of my “main men.” How could you not like somebody who once wrote about “slimy things” making a painter of him? Nor was the man being sensational. What he meant is that, as things decompose, losing their original shape and smell (while taking on shapes and smells that most definitely attract your attention), they are more arresting to a painter’s eye. Thus, a “slimy thing” is something that’s been under water for a time, but has recently emerged into the light of day as a piece of wharfage, for example; its skin of algae has transformed it into a sort of memento mori, which reminds us that we’re all caught up in a web of life that both nurtures and sinks us to the bottom.

Everybody follow that?

Constable was misunderstood in his day because, for one, he painted both spirit and substance, but not all of their particulars. This was a new thing in about 1820, when a lot of people wanted an inventory – a precise and wearisome recapitulation of natural phenomena - and not a landscape painting, which is now understood to be unified by light and atmosphere. (Constable tried to tell people about this sort of thing, but they never listened. And meanwhile kept complaining.) His contemporaries kept telling him to put in more; Constable, who knew better, was going for a more intense reality than they were willing to deal with. For old John, nature had both a spiritual and visual essence – something he and another contemporary, Joseph Mallard William Turner, were trying to get at in spite of all the nay-sayers around them.

Born the year our country started to break away from England, Constable died in 1837; a reassessment period got underway shortly afterwards, which has changed his “profile” for the better. He is now considered not only a great pioneer in the field of perception, but perhaps the most important precursor to Impressionism, which everybody loves to death, can’t get enough of, and will queue up before major exhibits of the stuff nineteen to the dozen.

It is strange to think of the controversy that raged around his work during his lifetime, yet it hasn’t actually let up today. It pits the fussy literalist against the impulsive romantic; crabbed effort vis-a-vis open-air spontaneity; cold rationality versus freewheeling emotion.

You can see Constable at his very best in “The Six Foot Paintings” now on exhibit at the East Wing of the National Gallery till December 31st. The curators came up with the long-overdue notion that Constable’s most famous finished paintings ought to be seen spang up against his six-foot sketches. And they’ve done one helluva job. They were also careful in showing us some of the “keystone” paintings that led up to Constable’s leap to his larger format.

Aside from their technical bravura, the sketches show us a Constable who waded right up to his subject – in this case, his father’s mill; the River Stour that flowed alongside of it and was useful for trade; the hard-working people (and animals) manning the barges; and the glorious, sun-struck Suffolk countryside that was called “Constable’s country” even while the man himself was still alive. Constable’s most famous painting, “The Hay Wain”, preens as a finished product, with all of its proverbial ducks in a row. In the sketch, you see Constable really putting his heart into realizing a spatial unity and it’s one of the most thrilling experiences I’ve ever had. Equally captivating is the fabulous “Leaping Horse”, whose flashing highlights and stand of murky tree-forms show us, insofar as one painting can, what landscape painting will become in the next fifty years. The finished product is, for me, a disappointment – though it’s a more-than-competent “version” of the sketch. It is too bad Constable had to play to his market. Today, his sketches alone would be admired, not only for their racing audacity, but for their spiritual exactitude as well. If a man ever had perfect spiritual pitch, it was John Constable.

Sprinkled throughout the exhibit are small drawings and sketches, which further illuminate Constable’s process. There isn’t a dull one among them.

So: if you ever see an exhibit of Impressionist paintings, you’ll know who started Monet and Pissarro off on the long road they followed. Constable was the original Impressionist – though I think he loved his little village of East Bergholt more than any Impressionist would love the small piece of earth he would convert into a vibrating unity of his own.

Again, the show runs through December 31st. If there’s any art exhibit you absolutely must see in the City of Washington, this is the one – particularly if you have ever considered any landscape painter among the “main men” in your life.

In his Vienna days, Hitler lived for a time at 31 Stumpergasse (and not "29", as it's often asserted.) Hitlerites by the dozen (surely there can't be any more of them) have been taking snapshots of this other place for years and swearing that the place in the picture is where the evil maniac-to-be lived in his earlier days.

Well, it's more the myth than the reality that counts anyway. Or, rather say: close enough!

Hitler was a sort of remittance man, living on a small inheritance from his mother, who passed away at forty-seven from something that would be easily treatable today, though it doesn't sound like much fun. He came to Vienna with a letter of introduction to a famous opera designer, one Alfred Roller, whom he did not meet until he, Hitler, was somewhat more advanced in rank and more important to Rollen's career than Rollen could have ever been to his. But Hitler seemed to have shied away from the meeting, as if to ensure the harsh and unforgiving climate that would motivate him to quit painting and start making somewhat irresponsible accusations against the Jews - though slanderous sentiments of this sort were hardly rare in Europe at this time. But for a great while, Hitler - sans introduction - stuck to painting, or at least the IDEA of painting while he dressed up for the opera or read every newspaper he could get his mitts on. As his fortunes declined, he enlisted the help of Jews to see that his artwork got sold so that he, Adolph, might scrape up enough money for rent and opera tickets.

Eventually, of course, Hitler wound up, not on the streets, but in a home for the indigent, developed by far-seeing planners and funded by at least one Jew.
It was an interesting place to be, particularly for a proud young man who scorned the idea of taking a regular job because he was, after all, more educated than the average worker. It was here that he began to evolve into the lovable newsreel chap who exhorted an entire people to stay the course, as it were, and be unified as one nation under Wagner, with not a whole lot of liberty - but lots of kitschy rallies - for all. He was assisted in his development, so to say, by the example of Mayor Lueger, who didn't mind stooping to the sort of anti-Semitic attacks that must have made Jewish intellectuals both shrug their shoulders and wet their pants. It took almost thirty years from the time Hitler found himself in such dire straits till the moment the Reich chancellor strode into the Heldenplatz in triumph. It must've been worth the wait; Hitler was so happy about it he found it in his heart to welcome his adopted city - which had spurned his talent - into the National Socialist fold.

Hitler was not a particularly happy young man - which, to the psychologically-oriented, should come as no surprise. His amours were affairs of the imagination only. In his small hometown, he conceived of an epic attraction for a beautiful girl who was possibly above his station, but theoretically available. Did he tell her about it? Nein! He just sat around, moped, and watched her move about in beauty. He was dead set on marrying her, but, once again, thought and action failed to coalesce, and she, of course, took the hand of somebody else without ever knowing that he, Hitler, yearned passionately to offer his own. Yet in dreaming grandiosely of her, he set himself up for his future metier: dreaming grandiosely for millions. His dream-life was, in fact, his strongest suit, being something that was not only indelibly his, but a thing that was self-enlarging at a time when he probably felt very small indeed.

Hitler was very good at vicarious affections. I doubt whether a real person would have actually measured up to his ideals.

While he was at 31 Stumpergasse, he reveled in dreams of himself as a great artist, though he failed his exams at the art academy not once, but twice. He was told, point-blank, that his skills didn't cut the mustard and not to come back. That must've hurt. The tremendous pride and overweening pretensions of the young man were thus thwarted, not just in life, but in a sphere he thought he'd eventually conquer - and to which he felt he most indubitably belonged. Yes, a very, very bad thing to happen, this. It's one of those turning points in world history that make the study and analysis of men and events so horribly
captivating.

Hitler is said to have worked jobs now and then, but apparently this is not true. He never thought of taking a job, even as his money dwindled and, finally, ran out completely. He even took to begging - at which he was not particularly successful. Begging is something for which proud and arrogant people are not eminently qualified.

But he always managed to have well-wishing friends who saw something salvageable in him and offered to help him. Such a man stepped forward at the house in Meidling, Hitler's final tour of duty before he enlisted - ecstatically - in the Bavarian Army at the outbreak of WWI.

His name was Reinhold Hanisch and he made himself go-between for the shy, but irascible young man who couldn't bear to be contradicted, and whose thumping monologues were not merely annoying, but had a somewhat mesmerizing quality about them. If you liked to listen to a good rant, Hitler was definitely your man. But you didn't want to send him to a frame-shop with a portfolio under his arm!

Hitler's subjects were almost invariably architectural, as befits a young man who strolled in awe along the Ringstrasse, marvelling at the Royal Opera House (now the "Statsoper"), the Kuntshistorisches Museums, not to mention the majestic sweep of the great avenue itself, which began in splendor and kept right on going. He'd not seen much of that in his little old hometown and he was more than hooked: he was crazy about the place. He astonished his Nazi colleagues in later years by his accurate recall of the Ring and its various architectural properties, which he could draw from memory. One might, however, agree with his professors in condemning many of his efforts, which are awkward, but painstaking. Yet from time to time Hitler manages to nail his subject and it has a brooding majesty, a palpable presence. Hitler was a bad artist most of the time, but he had his moments. His picture of the Royal Opera House is decent enough, but he outdid himself with a painting of an old waterworks, done apparently in gouache, which run parallel across the foreground in front of a streetscape they effectively cut off from the viewer. It is a stirring piece of work and holds up very well. If I had just seen the
picture somewhere, I would asked who'd done it.

Yet his erratic production in art would, of course, haunt him later in life, when he made the disastrous military decisions that would eventually cost him and his Thousand Year Reich the war. A damned good thing for us, of course. Unfortunately, Hitler had his good days too.

It would, obviously, have been better for almost everybody had Hitler the artist kept at it. Apart from its obvious effect on world affairs, it might have also given us a Vienna we have never seen: one in which the visual potency of a great imperial city might have been at glorious odds with a deeply manic-depressive, not to say hysterical, personality.
Shiele was active at the time, as was Klimt. They were obviously innocent of the young Hitler living in his doss-house over in Meidling, and had they seen his worst stuff - and of this there is no dearth - they wouldn't have been impressed. Hitler was, in fact, lucky to have Hanisch looking out for him because a lot of the crap he did was hardly even worthy of the venues chosen for it. Yet, given time, Hitler might have actually turned into a creditable, if uneven, talent whom the academy might have ultimately embraced.

Of course, if you look at most of the stuff he was doing, you'd have to share the verdict of the old professors who gave him the boot and started him off in his other, more infamous direction. I'm sure the moral of this story has been discussed at tremendous length among Hitler Studies' enthusiasts, but it seems that whenever an artist is lost to the world, he or she does something a helluva lot worse - as if to be an artist scorned is one of the most wicked human scourges imaginable. Could be. I can't stand having my pictures misunderstood, disliked, or (needless to
say) rejected. I always understand the context within which these things happen. I know that this person simply can't "relate" to the work at hand. This other person might be highly emotional and can't help but reacting, not only to my work, but to everything in this way. And this juror. . .well, this juror is so completely captivated, not to say smothered, by his or her prejudices that it is simply impossible for him or her to step out and away from them. If I'm a victim of these prejudices, I should simply acknowledge that they can do harm now and then and try to find a more receptive audience. And I do. I do every single one of these things.

And yet I still want to kill the juror.