day 5

Visited the Secession building which is about 2 minutes from our apartment. Really beautiful place done in what the non art student would recognise as art nouveau but is in fact, Secession! There was a pile of tat on the first floor that made me feel middle aged and grouchy. Call this art? There was a muddy puddle, for instance. How many puddles do you think they created before the artist cried out with relief 'yes, YES, this is the definitive muddy puddle, my life has been building to this moment of clarity'? There was also a video of a girl riding a bike backwards and a squashed ant on top of a Conan Doyle novel. Thankfully, the Beethoven Frieze was downstairs to make up for the fraudulent trash upstairs. Klimt is my favourite artist and Ive wanted to see his stuff for a long time. I got to see some in Venice last year but Vienna has the bulk of it because he was based here and it was from here that the whole fin de siecle thing began and ended. So I was blown away by the Beethoven Freize and felt awful knowing that as I left I may never get to see it again.
After that we went to the Leopold Museum where we saw lots more Klimt and Scheiler too. Some of the Scheiler was great but generally you could see why the police busted his house and chucked him in prison for having young girls visiting. Who knows the truth.
In the afternoon we wandered round and happened across the Town Hall and got escorted off the premises of the Leichenstein Palace. Long story.
After eating, we went to the cinema at 10:55pm to see The Third Man. It was superb. A first for me and it was so interesting to see Vienna at war and of course anything taken from a Greene novel is a delight.