My Favorite Paintings at Albertina Museum, Vienna

The renown Albertina Museum in Vienna, Austria was mostly valued for its graphic art collections, such as works by the incomparable Albrecht Dürer, whose ultra-realistic drawings and watercolors were so delicate that the museum only put reproductions on display, therefore, I refrain from citing his works as my favorite there.

Albertina Museum also had some really impressive oil paintings, amongst which, I was particularly enthralled by paintings by Max Beckmann and Paul Delvaux.

The Frau mit Katze (Woman with Cat) by German artist Max Beckmann was a stylish, understated yet highly erotically charged woman portrait, typical of his pre-Third-Reich oeuvre, without the unsettling sinister atmosphere permeated in his later works.

I was particularly enchanted by the sitters' self-satisfying langour, the marvelously subtle and bold interplays of orange, yellow, pale purple, green and black shades, and the sitter's slightly monumental bulk, which didn't take away any of her sensuality or her femininity.


Frau mit Katze (Woman and Cat), Max Beckmann, 1942, Öl auf Leinwand (Oil on Canvas)

My second favorite works was Belgian painter Paul Delvaux's Landschaft mit Lanternen (Landscape with Lanterns) - a mysterious cityscape which extended to landscape under cool moonshine, almost symmetrical, with a noble-looking woman stood at the foreground, looking into the goings-on on the receding away from the viewers, including two small figures in white, carrying a stretcher with a person enshrouded in white sheet, against the gently lit hills dotted with unfinished architectures, or strange gate-shaped structures, corresponding to the seemingly unfinished city structures in the foreground.


Landschaft mit Lanternen (Landscape with Lanterns), 1958, Paul Delvaux (1897-1994)

The cool atmosphere and the classical symmetry recalled The Ideal City by Piero della Francesca (?) though the mood of Delvaux's painting was much darker and more mysterious, even quite sinister, and the story was much harder to decode, thus even more fatally attractive.


The Ideal City, Piero della Francesca, public domain work of art

During my visit, I shot the picture with a viewer looking inside the frames, and her presence added another layer to this haunting piece.

My Favorite Museum Collection Series
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List of My Favorite Artworks in the Museums I've Visited


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