Vienna for Art, History, Food, Wine, Architecture, and Photography

In September 2023, we finally arrived in Vienna. It had been on top of our list before COVID interfered with everyone’s travel plans.

For many years, Vienna has consistently ranked among the world’s top 5 most liveable cities. Everything seems to work: the city has numerous pedestrian streets, generous public transportation, parks and squares that invite friends and families to gather, restaurants and cafés, and more art and culture than you could hope to absorb.

10 Days in Vienna in a Romantic Hotel

We had 10 days of art and architecture as the beginning of a 17-day trip that included Graz and the wine country in Upper Styria, centered on Gamlitz.

The direct flight from Toronto to Vienna was easy. Once we landed, things got weird. For our stay in Vienna, we had chosen Hotel Motto, a fairly prominent downtown hotel in Vienna’s sixth district on Mariahilfer Strasse, a well-known pedestrian street.

Unfortunately, our taxi driver had never heard of the hotel. He let us know once we were halfway into the city.

Google Maps to the rescue! I took his phone and guided him turn-by-turn through a maze of one-way streets to get there. You’d think he’d know how to use the app, but no. Never mind.

We were happy to arrive to a warm welcome. Hotel Motto is a charming deco-style hotel with a rooftop Chez Bernard restaurant, a Motto Brot bakery and sandwich shop on the street level, an entrance to the Metro underneath, and a location that’s a pleasant walk to Vienna’s legendary Museums Quartier.

We had a spacious and romantic junior suite on the 5th floor with views over the city. It was the perfect hotel for us.

Historical notes about the hotel: Before its 2021 rebirth as Hotel Motto, it was known as Hotel Kummer (maybe that was the problem with the taxi driver).

At the end of World War II, when Vienna was under the rule of the occupying forces, the French delegation took over the hotel. They knew how to choose buildings.

In 1980, Canadian author John Irving wrote much of The Hotel New Hampshire while living in the hotel. The middle section of the book takes place in an old Viennese hotel. In the novel, the dog is named Kummer.

Where Do You Start With Vienna’s Museums and Art Galleries?

Vienna has been a culturally rich city for centuries, thanks to the six-century rule of the Habsburg family. The Habsburgs were highly focused on the prestige conferred by art and architecture and spent lavishly on palaces, statues, and paintings. Their largesse was evident in the major galleries and museums, many of which are centrally located in the Museums Quartier (MQ).

These are the museums we went to. The first four are located in the MQ.
Leopold Museum
Mumok Modern Art Museum
Kunsthistorisches Museum
Natural History Museum
Nearby, you’ll find the Albertina Museum, the Secession Museum, and a bit further away, the magnificent Belvedere (see the image at the top of the page), the Albertina Modern, and the Museum of Applied Arts, the MAK Museum.
There are many more museums and galleries, but these are the ones we visited, some of which we visited twice.

Rock Star Klimt, Leader of the Vienna Secession

Although Vienna has a long history of classical art, I was most interested in seeing work by Gustav Klimt (1862–1918) and his young disciple, Egon Schiele (1890–1918), and then discovering others who were part of their artistic milieu. These were the bad boys of the Austrian art scene.

1918 wasn’t a good year for these guys. Klimt died in February of a stroke and pneumonia, and the 28-year-old Schiele in October of the Spanish flu epidemic.

Most people are familiar with Klimt’s highly stylised, decorative, erotic portraits of women, featuring lavish applications of gold leaf. The most famous of these portraits is The Kiss, on display at the Belvedere. It draws crowds like the Mona Lisa at the Louvre.

Any Klimt works that are still in private hands occasionally appear at auction and command top dollar. His first portrait of salon hostess Adele Bloch-Bauer, which sold for $135 million in 2006, is now in New York.

Oprah Winfrey once owned his second portrait of Bloch-Bauer (bought it for $88 million, then sold it to a collector ten years later for $150 million—a good way to make $60 million).

Although we didn’t see these two Klimts, we saw many others at the Belvedere (the world’s most extensive collection of Klimts), the Leopold, and the Secession building.

What surprised me most were his landscapes. He spent many months on Lake Attersee at the summer home of his lifetime companion, Emilie Flöge. That’s where he created the majority of his dense forest landscapes, often shown with the lake in the foreground.

Klimt and the Secession Museum During World War II

When the Nazis came to power, they famously declared war on what they called “degenerate art”. That mainly meant modern art, pieces that weren’t wholly realistic in either colour or style. It also meant any art created by a Jewish artist or featuring Jewish models.

What about Klimt? Seemingly, the Nazis loved him. In 1943, in the middle of the war, they staged a major Klimt retrospective featuring 50 oil paintings and 48 works on paper in the Secession building.

Klimt wasn’t Jewish, but many of his subjects were. The Nazis simply renamed them with generic titles, such as “Portrait of a Woman With Gold Background,” rather than the original name, Adele Bloch-Bauer.

Emilie Flöge, the Viennese Fashion Icon, Was a Real Discovery

I found the Klimt/Flöge relationship fascinating and had read about it before we went. They never married and didn’t have any children together, while Klimt fathered numerous children with other women (didn’t marry them either).

Emilie, along with her sisters Helene and Pauline, operated Schwestern Flöge (“Flöge Sisters”), a progressive and influential fashion salon.

It opened in 1904 in a modern, custom-designed space created by architects associated with the Vienna Secession, a movement with which Flöge and Klimt were deeply connected.

I found the location of the Flöge salon at 1b Mariahilfer Straße, at the end of the street near the museums. There’s a plaque on the building commemorating the business.

Flöge and her business outlived Klimt by decades. The company closed in the early 1930s when many of her Jewish clients left Vienna, and Flöge survived WWII living quietly in Vienna. She died in 1952. She’s now buried near Klimt in the Hietzing Cemetery.

Interested in Secession and Wiener Werkstätte? The MAK is For You

It’s generally accepted that the MAK (Museum of Applied Arts) is the best museum in the world for Secession and Wiener Werkstätte period furniture and decorative objects.

We loved it. With Marlene’s background in commercial interior design, there was much to appreciate, especially the pieces by Josef Hoffmann and his studio. High style, designed for functionality, fresh colours. It’s no wonder these pieces are in constant demand and are often imitated.

Richard Gerstl—The Obscure, Visionary, Anti-Klimt Artist

I love discovering new artists when we travel. On this trip, one of my discoveries was the expressionist work of Richard Gerstl (1883–1908) at the Leopold Museum.

Gerstl was a gnarly, hard-to-love young man— a moody, opinionated, outspoken, impolite loner.

Unlike many Viennese artists of the time who worshipped Klimt, Gerstl denounced him, favoring Munch, Van Gogh, and Bonnard. He once turned down a showing in a prestigious gallery, demanding that the gallery get rid of their Klimts before he would consider showing there.

Gerstl’s fame, or notoriety, had more to do with his relationship with the older composer Arnold Schönberg and his wife Mathilde. Schönberg, breaking new musical ground with 12-tone compositions, was also an outsider, so that may have been the basis of their friendship.

Gerstl painted portraits of Schönberg, Mathilde, and their two young children. He went on a summer vacation with the family, giving them painting lessons.

Sometime in 1907, Gerstl and Mathilde began an affair. The following year, he proposed marriage, asking Mathilde to leave her family to be with him. She turned him down.

On the night that Schönberg held a concert for friends (pointedly excluding Gerstl), Gerstl stabbed and then hung himself in his studio. He was 25 and virtually unknown. His brother kept all of his paintings. (Reminds me of Vincent and Theo Van Gogh.)

It wasn’t until the 1950s that collectors started to pay attention to Gerstl, and fortunately for us, one of them was Rudolf Leopold, the founder of the Leopold Museum. This museum now houses the world’s most extensive collection of Gerstl paintings (also the largest collection of Egon Schiele).

Vienna Museums Also Highlight Living Painters

Although Vienna has a remarkably rich history, it’s not stuck in the past. Many of the museums feature shows by contemporary artists. Notably, the Mumok is all contemporary.

At the Albertina Modern, we saw a group show of German and Austrian paintings from the last 50 years. A highlight was a pair of canvases by Xenia Hausner, a Viennese artist, from a series called Exiles. The bright candy colours seemed to counter the poignant narrative told by the paintings.

We also loved the delightful “angry girl” comic book style show by Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara.

Protesting an Early 1900s Mayor—the Spirit of Vienna

In front of the MAK museum, there’s a small square with a statue of an early 1900s mayor. Apparently, he did many wonderful things for Vienna from an infrastructure perspective. However, he was a fervent nationalist and anti-Semite.

Protestors have poured paint over the statue and displayed a protest art piece in front of it. Vienna didn’t seem to be in a hurry to change it. Let the protest stand? Perhaps.

Eating in Vienna—Careful About That Schnitzel Order

Many times, we ate at museum restaurants. We’ve been doing that for years in our travels. The Viennese museum restaurants didn’t disappoint—offering imaginative menus, reasonable prices, and sometimes spectacular surroundings. Be sure to have lunch or coffee in the Kunsthistorisches Museum.

But, being in Vienna, we were also looking for schnitzel. It’s not hard to find, and we went to a recommended restaurant, which was “cheap and cheerful”.

Here we made the amateur’s mistake. We ordered one each. Seems normal, right? It does until the plates hit the table. The schnitzels overflow the plates, far more than either of us could eat. Accompanying them were sides of potato salad and cucumber salad. We decided to wash it down with a large beer. It was all delicious, but far more than we could eat.

Two young women at the next table did the right thing: split one order. Plenty of food, half the cost.

The other meal we were looking for was tafelspitz, a specialty at the Pauchuta restaurants (there are five of them in Vienna). A friend who once lived in Vienna gave it a strong recommendation, so we had to have it. We found one of the restaurants near the opera and settled in for a late lunch.

Tafelspitz is beef cooked in a soup broth, served at the table in a large copper pot. It includes bone marrow, sides of potatoes with bacon, creamed spinach, horseradish in apple sauce, and a white sauce for the beef. So good! Worth hunting down.

I must mention coffee, cake, and white wine. Yes, have the Sacher Torte at the Sacher Hotel, but there are so many other cakes and cafés to sample. (Those fancy pastries you see in Paris? All originated in Vienna.)

Although we usually favour red wine, and Austria does make some, it was their white wines, in particular the Rieslings and Grüner Veltliners, that filled our glasses. We were delighted with that.

It’s easy to eat and drink well in Vienna.

Three More Vienna Highlights: Hundertwasserhaus, Naschmarkt, and the Prater Park

Friedensreich Hundertwasser was a true Renaissance man: a revolutionary architect, artist, gardener, radical environmentalist, and author.

Admittedly, we didn’t know much about him, but we knew we wanted to visit the Hundertwasserhaus. We were surprised that it was built as recently as 1985. It’s an apartment building, so you can’t tour it. But what a particular vision it was to create this. Amazed it got through all the building codes. There are other buildings by him in Vienna, but we didn’t look for them. More on Hundertwasserhaus here.

Naschmarkt is a well-known food market featuring dozens of diners, bistros, and cafés catering to every price range. It can be overwhelming to pick one, but we found a perfect seafood restaurant. The whole market was packed, so it’s obvious that it’s a big draw for both locals and tourists. Add it to your list of places to eat at least once, possibly more.

Prater is a vast park in northeast Vienna (close to the Hundertwasserhaus, so you could schedule both on the same day). Prater combines a traditional green park, much like other famous city parks (Central Park, Hyde Park, Tuileries), with a full-time amusement park.

We started by walking through much of Prater, stopping for dinner in one of the restaurants, and then staying for the amusement park in the evening. The Ferris Wheel and one of the rollercoasters were highlights. Here’s a good page on Prater.

Would We Go Back to Vienna? Yes…

Even with 10 days in the city, you only scratch the surface of a city like Vienna. If I look at my original “to-do list”, we accomplished about half of them.

Vienna would be an ideal city to visit around Christmas, with its streets lit up, its legendary markets, and restaurants competing to outdo each other with special holiday menus.