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The Belvedere Palace, with its elegant Baroque gardens,
was the lavish home of Prince Eugene of Savoy, the still-much-appreciated
conqueror of the Turks. Eugene was the greatest military genius of his age
and highly valued by his emperor.
When you conquer great enemies, as Eugene did,
you get really rich. Since he had no heirs, the state inherited his palace.
In the 19th century, Emperor Josef II converted the palace
into Austria's first great public art gallery.
It houses the Austrian gallery of 19th- and 20th-century art.
As Austria became a leader in European art around 1900,
that age is the collection's forte, with fine works by a school of respected romantics,
Egon Schiele,
and Gustav Klimt.
In the room full of sumptuous paintings by Klimt
you can get caught up in his creed that all art is
***. He was fascinated with both the beauty and
the danger of women. He painted during the turn-of-the-century
when Vienna was a splendid laboratory of hedonism—
the love of pleasure. For Klimt, Eve was the prototypical woman;
her body, not the apple, provided the seduction.
Frustrated by censorship, Klimt refused
every form of state support. While he didn't paint women
entirely nude, he managed to capture
a bewitching eroticism.
Here, Judith is no biblical heroine but a high society Viennese woman
with an ostentatious necklace. With half-closed eyes and lightly parted lips,
she's dismissive yet mysterious and seductive. Holding the head of her
Biblical victim,
she's the modern Femme Fatale.
In perhaps his most famous painting, The Kiss, the woman is no longer
dominating
but submissive, abandoning herself to her man in a fertile field
and a vast universe. In a glow emanating from a radiance of desire,
the body she presses against is a self-portrait
of the artist himself—
Gustav Klimt.