The Acropolis Marbles

This post is about one room in a museum. I promise it's not that simplistic. Let's get right to it...

Actually...let me say one more thing first. 

I debated using an apostrophe after the word "Acropolis" in the title of this post. I think it's correct but ultimately, I think it looks better without. I do, however, think that there should be an apostrophe. Sometimes you can't have it all. It's not the first time I've bent the rules of grammar or punctuation based on how I think things should look. Oxford comma. That's all I really need to say on that subject. NOW, let's get right to it...

Last fall we visited Greece. Or maybe more accurately, last fall we visited Athens. As an architect, a trip to Athens was a long time coming for one reason and one reason alone: the Acropolis, the hilltop site in the center of the city which includes the most perfect Greek Doric temple of all time, the Parthenon. Look, the Greeks pretty much invented architecture. Finally laying eyes on one of their masterpieces (if not THE masterpiece) was super exciting.

Our whole experience at the Acropolis was incredible. I mean it really was as impressive as I'd been promised for decades. Our understanding and appreciation of the 2,500 or so year old temples on top of the hill was only enhanced by our visit to the Acropolis Museum right after we descended back down to Athens proper. But our visit to this site wasn't really complete, and that's because a good portion of the sculpture and carvings that used to be on the Parthenon are neither on the building itself nor are they in the Acropolis Museum. 

Now, this is not some huge mystery regarding what happened to them. It's not like they are lost or locked away somewhere. Everyone knows where they are. They are in the British Museum in the middle of London. So after visiting Greece and not seeing them there where they started out, and this year finding ourselves in England and more specifically London, we couldn't not go see these things and make last fall's trip to Greece more complete. 

Make sense? It made perfect sense to us.

Let's address the most obvious question about what I've written so far, shall I? Why is a part of the Parthenon in London and not in Athens where the rest of the mostly intact ancient temple is? It's a simple question, right? Maybe there's a simple answer. And I think there is. The simple answer is that they were removed from their original location by Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin, in the early 1800s. The truth, from at least one side of the table, would be argued as more nuanced than I've just described. So, not being one to mince words (or facts, in this case) let's just dig into that whole history for a minute.

Greece has not existed continuously as a country (or even as a collection of truly independent city-states) since the time of the Parthenon. It's evolved or devolved from a relatively successful series of independent cities to quite a bit less than that before pulling things together and establishing an independent nation. In between the Parthenon times and now (and like most places on this planet of ours) parts of modern day Greece at one time were under foreign control. In the early 1800s when this part of the story takes please, the city of Athens happened to be part of the Ottoman Empire. 

Now two plus centuries ago, much like today, nations appointed ambassadors to other nations to provide a personal touch in maintaining diplomatic relations. In the year 1800, the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire was one Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin. And I guess this appointment caused Bruce (I'm going to switch back and forth between Bruce and Elgin in this post when referring to the man) to turn his attention to the carvings that once adorned (or still did adorn in some cases) the Parthenon on the northern side of Athens' Acropolis. He decided he would use part of his time in his new post having some folks under his employment makes some plaster casts and drawings of the remaining sculpture still hanging around the site. For posterity, I'd imagine.

Elgin approached the British government to see if they'd like to cover the cost of his idea and the answer was apparently a hard no. So he decided to do it himself. He hired himself a crew and they started working. To make long story short and I'm sure I'm skipping a ton of details, at some point, this effort switched from making plaster casts and drawings to just removing the items from Athens entirely and bringing them to London where they just became the property of Lord Elgin. I know, I know, I skipped a lot of the story.

For his part, Elgin claimed to have the permission of the Ottoman Empire to abscond with some of their treasures and even produced a signed document from the Ottomans endorsing the removal. Apparently, the Ottoman Empire have never publicly confirmed the legitimacy of the document but Bruce had his story. 

The treasures of the Parthenon are not, today, in the possession of the descendants of Lord Elgin. They are (as I've already mentioned) in the British Museum. How did the British museum get them? Well...they bought them in August of 1816 for tidy sum of £35,000. 

Isn't it kind of sketchy for the British government to purchase some artwork that clearly originated at the site of another nation's national treasures and that were removed under some circumstances that appeared to be less than wholly legitimate? Apparently, the answer to that question was "yes" and to avoid the appearance of impropriety, in February 1816, the House of Commons conducted an investigation into whether the pieces of the Parthenon were removed legally or not. Today, there are questions about the document Elgin claimed was issued to him by the Turks and (assuming that document was genuine) whether removal of sculptures and carvings from the site are covered by that document. But in early 1816, apparently it was good enough for the House of Commons. Purchase approved! 

Today, all of the treasures gathered by Elgin sit in a special room on the west side of the British Museum. The room is dumbbell shaped and you enter the room at the center of the "handle" and are greeted by a carved sign that reads "These galleries designed to contain the Parthenon sculptures were given by Lord Duveen of Millbank 1939", although 1939 is written out in Roman numerals. These things are a big deal to the Museum. They are very valuable and important, even though they have absolutely nothing to do with anything to do with Great Britain or the British Empire other than some dude who was British removed them from their original location and sold them to the Museum.

Dionysus. Perhaps drinking wine at one time? Maybe?

The entire current "Elgin Marbles" collection includes three series of sculptures: (1) statuary from the east and west pediments of the Parthenon (the pediments are the triangular pieces at each end of the building); (2) 15 metopes or carved panels from the outside of the building which were located just above the perimeter columns; and (3) a good portion of the frieze that was installed on the exterior of the interior cella. The cella basically formed the two rooms of the temple, one of which housed the long lost statue of Athena. 

Of all the sculptures and carvings in the collection, the metopes (which show a battle between a group of centaurs and a peoples known as Lapiths at the wedding of Pirithous and Hippodamia) and the frieze (which shows a celebration procession for a festival honoring Athena) are clearly the best preserved of the artifacts in the room. They are actually largely intact, particularly the many panels of the frieze (there is about half of the total length of the frieze from the Parthenon in the British Museum) which are generally two-dimensional carved panels and have little to be knocked off because of the complete lack of three dimensional objects in space. If they are damaged, they are often broken at the corners.

The centaurs and Lapiths on the metopes are less intact, mostly a product of arms or legs or heads of centaurs and Lapiths being carved in the round away from the panels. In some cases, the heads are out there. Just not in London. Or Athens either. One of the description cards next to one of the metopes informed us that the missing head of the Lapith about to be hit with a pitcher by a centaur is in a museum in Copenhagen. Why? Why does some museum in Copenhagen need a part of that panel?

As a bit of an aside here, the centaurs and Lapiths are fighting because at the wedding that both groups were invited to, the centaurs tried to kidnap some of the Lapith women. Don't invite centaurs to your wedding is a lesson learned here for me.

Headless metope. Want to see the heads? Go to Copenhagen.

The most important and most visible, but also the least well preserved, sculptures in the Museum are the figures from the pediments at the ends of the Parthenon. These things are in some cases little more than fragments. Dionysus reclining among the figures that used to occupy the east pediment is probably the most intact, just missing his right arm and his left hand. I'm assuming at least one of those missing hands was holding a cup of wine. Heck, maybe even both were. 

I assume the reason that these particular sculptures are in such poor condition is that they could fall off or be knocked off the building and the result of such a fall would pretty much shatter the statues to bits upon impact. I remember seeing an animation in the Parthenon Museum last year showing Christians up on the pediments throwing the heathen god statues to the ground and smashing them. For some reason that animation stuck with me. Maybe learning in museums does work after all. 

The biggest thing that struck me about seeing the marbles from the pediments, though, was not their condition or their lack of completeness. It was the fact that they were carved on the back sides. Here are these figures that were installed way above ground level 2,500 or so years ago and the back sides will never, ever be seen. I mean, never. They have to know that, right? Yet the hems and folds of what the gods and titans and whomever else was wearing up there a long way from anyone being able to see anything really are detailed in stone by some stone carver who spent their time embellishing a piece of marble in a way nobody was ever intended to see. It's impressive. 

Or maybe they knew one day some English lord would swipe what they carved from where they were supposed to be and stick them in some museum where someone like me would marvel at the attention to detail. I guess we'll never know which of those versions of the story is true.

The back side of the east pediment statuary.

So let me just say this one small but pretty important thing about this whole setup: these things would have a whole lot more meaning back in Athens in the Acropolis Museum which sits directly at the bottom of the Acropolis and in sight of the actual, still there in place, Parthenon.

Are the statues and carvings in the special room in the British Museum impressive in their own right? Sure they are. They look incredible for being 2,500 years old. Even to me, and let's just assume I know nothing about the quality of ancient Greek sculpture, they look like pretty darned impressive specimens of sculpture from the fifth century B.C.

But can they be understood the same in London as they can be in Athens? Not to me, they can't. Maybe there are people out there a lot smarter about this stuff than me but there's no emotional connection, no sense of understanding the place from which these things were created. Our trip to the British Museum to see the Parthenon marbles was not my first viewing of these sculptures. I'd been twice before to the Museum to see these masterpieces. The meaning of these panels and figures didn't hit home until I actually set foot in Athens and went to see the place where they started out for myself. It would just be a lot more meaningful to have them back where they started. Why deny people who have made the pilgrimage to the Acropolis the opportunity to see all of it? Why make people go to London after they have been to Athens to really understand the whole picture?

And to be a completist, I guess you'd at least have to go to Copenhagen as well to see the heads of some of the Lapiths and centaurs from the metopes. And maybe some other places too. Why aren't they all in one spot??

I will say that we went through something like my past British Museum experiences a couple of years ago. Knowing that one day we'd want to visit the ancient site of Ephesus in present day Turkey, we went to see the sculpture from that site that is housed in the Ephosos Museum in Vienna since we happened to be in Vienna to visit a few Christmas markets. My reaction to what we saw in that museum was the same as my first two viewings of the Parthenon sculptures at the British Museum. Cool ancient sculptures, but lacking any emotional attachment because I haven't actually been to the site they were swiped from. I guess I'll have to likely go back to Vienna if we ever make it to Ephesus. Oh well...I suppose we might have missed a thing or two in Vienna.

Let's not kid ourselves. These things are not going back to Greece any time soon. And it's not because the Museum had a special room built to house them back about a century ago. These works are valuable. They are prestigious. They bring people to the building to spend money (although admittedly, admission is free or at least optional which most people interpret as free). The British Museum has a very long and detailed explanation about the legality of their possession of their works on their website along with a standard disclaimer about a willingness to loan items out to other institutions in accordance with their standard loan procedures. 

All of that hasn't stopped the Greeks from trying to get them returned. They have made formal requests either directly to the British government or through UNESCO all the way back to 1836 and as recently as 2013 and there have been talks between the two countries ongoing up to the year 2022 but with absolutely no change in the ownership status. It's never going to happen.

The British side of the argument seems to center on three issues. First, they were obtained legally. Second, they are in better condition now as a result of their being in the United Kingdom for the last two plus centuries than they might have been had they remained in Athens. And third, if Britain started turning over antiquities based on an "it's better to have them in the place they were made originally" doctrine, then they would have to return a lot of stuff in their museums.

Here's my take. 

For me, legal or illegal ownership means nothing. Who cares? I know I said these artifacts are super valuable but they are way more valuable to everyone visiting Athens than they ever will be in London. If you want to say something about this, go to London then go Athens and then go back to London and tell me where they are more valuable. Until you have been to both, you don't really know.

I also don't care about what might have happened if they had remained in Athens. There's no proof that they would have been lost or destroyed or stolen by someone else and there is some evidence that cleaning methods used by the British Museum might have damaged some of the metopes and panels of the frieze. Where an item is better protected from damage is not an argument for thievery. 

I get the third point. However, I don't think giving the Acropolis Marbles back would cause some landslide of return of objects from all sorts of museums to their original locations. It certainly doesn't have to. One exception does not make a rule. There would have to be a way to rationalize keeping artifacts in museums that are in a different spot than the items originated.

Surely there must be a way to reunite these sculptures and carvings with the building they were removed from. Can't the United Kingdom and Greece find a way to work out a fair and equitable form of compensation even if it's exchange or rotation of artifacts with a huge and sincere acknowledgment to Britain for keeping them safe in times of strife or war in Greece? I'm not holding my breath. All I know is that people who visit the Parthenon in Athens would be better off being able to see these works of art at the site where they were originally installed. Travel is about discovery. It would be helpful for a monument as important as the Acropolis that the discovery be able to occur there and not on the other side of the continent.

That's all I have on this one. This third viewing (for me) of these marbles was the best and most important. But only because I understood where they came from based on our visit to Athens last year.

Lapiths and centaurs: still battling it out at the wedding. Just don't invite them...

Jugendstil

In 1994, I took my first trip to Paris and fell in love with something I never would have thought I would have fallen for: Art Nouveau architecture. This flowery, individualistic, nature-based, romantic style (I really dislike using that word...) of design and creation of buildings seemed completely at odds with everything I considered to be sacred and truthful about architecture. That is, rational, ornament-free, minimalist design. Modernism with a capital M. And maybe what came right before it.

That 1994 Paris trip emphasized to me something I already suspected, that in the history of architecture, the period that I am most fascinated with is the late 19th and early 20th century, a time when architects were trying to figure out what new materials and new methods of production (in addition to the re-discovery of reinforced concrete) meant to their expression in the building arts. Art Nouveau didn't fit into my definition of that struggle to come to terms with change brought about by the Industrial Revolution even though it really is in every way, from the timeline to the materials to the unique-ness in breaking from historical precedent. Paris corrected my definition. And Paris of course was right. Paris is always right.

Since 1994, I have tried to cover all the bases Art Nouveau-wise by visiting the cities that I considered to be the hotbeds of this movement. Paris in 1994 was followed by Glasgow in 1997 (and 2007) and Brussels in 2000 and Helsinki in 2002 and Barcelona in 2014. The last place I had on my list was Vienna. After a mis-fire in 2021, 2022 turned out to be the year I made it to Vienna. So Vienna wasn't JUST about the Christmas markets. It was also about Art Nouveau.

One of Otto Wagner's U stations on the Karlsplatz.

In Vienna, Art Nouveau was not called Art Nouveau. In Vienna, Art Nouveau falls under the umbrella of what was regionally (along with artists and architects working in Germany) called Jugendstil. More specifically, in Vienna, it was called the Vienna Secession movement. Is it really that fundamentally different from Art Nouveau in other places? Well...yes and no. Fundamentally different? Not so much. There are shades of grey that make Jugendstil different at least stylistically (there's that word again...) from its Art Nouveau cousins in other places, but at its core Jugendstil places value on nature-based (or perhaps arts and crafts influence) design that bucks traditional stylistic norms while also focusing on the design of not just the building but most of the contents of the building as well. In some cases, right down to the silverware on the dining table (which is probably also designed by the architect or designer). 

This wholistic design approach, while used in other countries and cities where Art Nouveau flourished, was probably taken to a new level of obsessiveness under Jugendstil. In Germany and Vienna, the architect or designer (or designers) were striving to create a Gesamtkunstwerk, or "total work of art". Others around the world may have been doing something close to the same thing, but they didn't have a special name for it. Jugendstil (which means "young style") did.

So what are these shades of grey I mentioned a couple of paragraphs back? Well, look, I'm no art or architectural historian, but it seems to me that while all forms of Art Nouveau draw inspiration from nature, Jugendstil draws decidedly more from human forms than any other manifestation of the movement. Go to Glasgow and you'll find flowers as decorative elements in the works of Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Visit Paris or Brussels and you'll find columns or handrails designed by Hector Guimard or Victor Horta that look decidedly like lilies or the stems of some other elegant plant. And stand on the roof of the Casa Batllo in Barcelona and you'll swear Antoni Gaudí clad the roof in dragon scales. But you won't find any people to speak of.

The Ankeruhr Clock, on Bauernmarkt near Hoher Markt, Vienna. Franz Matsch, designer.

Take a look at the roof of the Post Office Savings Bank in Vienna and you'll find a couple of what can only really be described as some sort of mythological gods or goddesses. You'll find something similar in the murals on the outside of the Vienna Secession Building or in the center of the Ankeruhr Clock. I'm not sure if these are manifestations of deities or sprites or just regular everyday humans but there is (for me at least) a fantastical quality to the way these people are represented. They seem otherworldly, like something out of a Tolkien novel.

I'm sure that is dumbing down the difference between Jugendstil and what was going on in France, Belgium, Spain, Scotland and elsewhere throughout the continent to an almost offensive level but that's how I see it. I also see decoration that is far more geometrical in a very German way. In case labeling something "German" doesn't adequately convey an immediate and specific reaction, I see motifs that are rigid, regular, repeated, formal and imperial.

Otto Wagner designed apartment block on the Linke Wienzeile (top) and the Wagner Villa II (bottom).

Most architectural or art movements or styles (it's the last time I'll do that, I promise) have some key or defining figures that dominate or guide or define the movement. Jugendstil in Vienna is no exception. Architects Joseph Maria Olbrich was hugely important as a founding father and Josef Hoffman contributed as much (if not more) as a product designer than a designer of buildings and guiding light of the movement.

But from the architecture side of things, Otto Wagner was clearly the most important figure in the Vienna Secession. He may not have played as important a role as Olbrich or Hoffmann in getting things off the ground, but he was the most embraced by the city and empire (like literally in terms of commissions) and clearly was the most prolific designer who contributed lasting works that are still around today a century or more later.

If there is one other notable difference between the Vienna Secession and other similar movements in Europe, it's that at least one of the founders is an artist and one of the leading tourist draws to Vienna today. Gustav Klimt's works (including his most famous painting The Kiss) are some of the star attractions in Vienna's Belvedere Museum. I don't think you will find any other artist that is as aligned with an Art Nouveau movement that has the standing and stature of Klimt. Lalique doesn't count for me there.

Klimt's The Kiss at the Belvedere (top), with adoring throngs, and the Beethoven Frieze (bottom) at the Secession Building.

There are no shortage of Jugendstil works to visit in Vienna, including a number which you can actually walk into and around and linger a while. The Vienna Secession building is still in use as it was originally intended as an art display space 124 years (!!!) after it was completed and first opened. There are also a number of Otto Wagner buildings open to the public, although not all are in use as originally intended including the first house he built for himself and a number of the original U stations that he designed, some of which are now museums or exhibition spaces.

There are also a number of works in and around the city center of Vienna, including the Altmann and Kuehne chocolatier (facade designed by Josef Hoffmann), a few Wagner apartment buildings and the magnificent Ankeruhr Clock designed by Franz Matsch. I don't know how we missed Hoffmann's chocolate store. I had it on my list and we must have walked by it at least twice (and maybe more). Distracted, I guess. It happens. Too much Christmas.

Picture of a VW on the street with Otto Wagner's Kirche am Steinhof in the background.

Speaking of Christmas...maybe not the best time to go to see as much Jugendstil as you can handle. Otto Wagner's U Pavillion on the Karlsplatz is now a museum celebrating Wagner's life and work. But not in December. Or November, January, February or the first half of March. You'll find something similar (meaning a museum which is closed in late fall and winter) at the emperor's personal railway station, the Hofpavillion, at the Schönbrunn Palace. I assume that the deal here is that these structures are not insulated and therefore not suitable for use in cold weather, but that's pure speculation on my part.

Good luck getting to one of Wagner's masterpieces, the Kirche am Steinhof, in December also. You can get there and get inside, but only if you arrange a visit in advance, pony up more than 100 Euros as a flat fee and pay a per person fee on top of that. If you do decide to do that, plan your trip out there carefully and make sure you end up at the door of the church, not within sight of the church on the other side of the hospital grounds that the church sits on. 

Despite not being willing to pay the fee to visit the inside of the Kirche, I figured we should go out there anyway since it's one of Wagner's major works. We Ubered and got dropped off right in front of the main entrance to the hospital to the south of the church. Accessing the exterior of the building would be just a quick walk through the hospital property. Easy, right?

Not so easy, we were informed. Not at that entrance. You have to walk further down to the west, we were told. Next hospital entrance...same story. And at the next. And the next. Eventually we gave up. We were into the walk less than a mile probably with another couple to go on snowy sidewalks in the cold. We never made it to the Kirche. We Ubered out of there onto other things. 

Majolikahaus, Linke Wienzeile 40 (top) and the Wagner Villa I (bottom).

So after all that whining and complaining, I'll say that I actually did get a really good Jugendstil experience out of our week in Vienna. It ended up being shaped mostly by the Secession Building; Otto Wagner's first residence; the Post Office Savings Bank; and the MAK Vienna (or in English, the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts).

If there's a classic, must-see Jugendstil building in Vienna, it's the Secession Building. It was literally the first place in Vienna we visited on our arrival after checking in at the hotel and getting some lunch at the nearby Nachsmarkt. Yes, this trip was about the Christmas markets but you can't see those in all their glory in the middle of the day. The Secession Building was the starting point of this trip.

When the artists who made up the membership of the Viennese Secession movement first got together as an organized bunch, the first thing they did was design and pay for their own building to be built. Must be nice, right? Nothing like announcing your presence as a group of artists by erecting a building just outside the historic center of Vienna. A poor group of starving artists, they were not, apparently.

I've been waiting decades to lay eyes on the Secession Building, with its stark white walls with cryptic messages in Latin and its "dome" made out of gold covered leaves. I expected it would be enormous to hold all the exhibit spaces that were the goal of the building and I imagined the famous Beethoven Frieze, one of Gustav Klimt's masterworks, ringing the rotunda at the top of the building formed by the gold leaf dome. 

Neither of those things are true. It is an efficiently compact building (I mean, it's in Europe; what did I really expect?) in the middle of a very old and historic city with its main gallery space in the rear of the building hidden from the front entrance side and precious little other gallery space elsewhere. And there is no gallery or rotunda in the leaf dome. Of course there isn't; you can actually see through the leaves to the sky above and beyond. It's a crown on the building, not the crowning space inside the building.

The Beethoven Frieze is in the basement. Really didn't expect that.

It is clear from visiting the Secession Building that the focus of the design inside was to display the art, and not the building. I guess that's smart. The building was not the point. The point was the gallery space and the forum for artists. Olbrich allowed his expression on the exterior of the building, from the various types of leaves of gold coated ornament, lines drawn on the building and actual trees planted in pots at the front door to a mural by Koloman Moser to a couple of trios of perched owls on the south facade. For a starting point to visit buildings executed by the Vienna Secession, the eponymous building is a great place to start in a number of ways.

I don't get Klimt, by the way. Just can't figure out the appeal. Maybe I'm not smart enough to understand. Other than The Kiss and maybe one or two other pieces, I find his works to be strange. His renderings of almost lifelike women on flat canvasses which look like they are being consumed by gold reminds me of the graphics in Tron (the original 1980s version), although I guess Tron should really remind me of Klimt. And I really don't get the Beethoven Frieze. Yes, I read the accompanying brochure in the building but I really can't see how naked women, gold-clad knights, starving and grotesque references to mythology and a giant ape have anything to do with Beethoven's Ode to Joy.

The Secession Building from the northwest. Not the greatest pic but it was raining and I didn't get a good front view.

The Secession Building main exhibition space. 

A trio of owls on the south facade of the building.

For all its importance to the movement, the Secession Building is a public work for displaying art and it's restrained, if you can really use that term to describe anything Art Nouveau (I believe you can). To find Jugendstil in all its excess, we'd need to get a lot more private. Like private house type of private. Like one built for Otto Wagner BY Otto Wagner. His first house, or villa, is now a museum. Although it's not a museum to Wagner.

Wagner built his first self-designed house sometime in the 1880s. When he sold it and moved next door to his second self-designed house, the house ran through a series of owners (including the Nazis in World War II) until it was purchased by Ernst Fuchs, an artist who in my very limited experience seems to be fixated on the Bible, mythological creatures and the exaggerated female body in most all his works. If I don't understand Klimt much, I really don't understand the point of Fuchs at all. His works are completely in your face offensive to me. Maybe that's the point.

Most of Wagner's first Villa looks nothing like it did when Otto Wagner was in residence. It has definitely been very Fuchs-ified from my point of view, although he apparently likely saved it from complete ruin when he purchased it in the 1970s. But there is one room, the Adolf Böhm parlor, which is full-on Jugendstil as Wagner left it. And it's spectacular.

This room used to be Wagner's studio and it is the space where he produced some of his masterworks, including the very inaccessible-in-winter Kirche am Steinhof. Everything about the room drips with Jugendstil, from snakes on the floor to the art glass windows to the gold stucco piping on the walls and ceiling (the Secession definitely had a thing about gold). It's a true mix between nods to nature of images of pure fantasy. It's absolutely gorgeous in the most decadent way. It's nothing like Art Nouveau in Paris or Brussels but it's still amazing.

It's also a complete collaboration. The art glass was the work of the room's namesake, Adolf Böhm, and the stucco work was executed by Joseph Maria Olbrich (of the Secession Building fame). I can't recall other Art Nouveau works being executed in such a partnership fashion.

The Adolf Böhm parlor, Otto Wagner Villa I, Vienna.

We saved the best until last.

When I said the first place we went to when we got to Vienna was the Secession Building, I wasn't kidding. It perfectly kicked off our Jugendstil experience in the city. The last place we visited in the city closed it; Otto Wagner's masterwork, the Post Office Savings Bank. If there is one true mature public work of architecture in Vienna executed by a Jugendstil designer, it's the Post Office Savings Bank over on the east side of the city just inside the Ringstrasse.

Art Nouveau and Jugendstil are great. I love experiencing these works of architecture and imagining the struggles that their creators went through trying to reconcile new methods of artistic expression using new materials made available by the industrial revolution that swept Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. When it gets resolved by a great architect, the result is sublime.

Everything that we saw about the Post Office Savings Bank was worth waiting for but (and in the interest of making what is already a very long post just a little bit shorter than it absolutely could be) there were a few things that stood out. Starting with the way the exterior of the building fronts onto the Georg-Coch-Platz, a small square of space off the Ringstrasse on top of (of all things) an underground parking garage entrance. It's a simple thing, here, but the main entrance of the Bank perfectly stops the space off Vienna's most important road while also displaying Wagner's opus in an ideal frame.

Most of this building was designed to hold the offices of the staff that made the bank work every day so there are precious few spaces or details that excite. The exterior of the building, with its patterned facade and god or goddess or angelic forms heralding the arrival of something seemingly really worth heralding is restrained and well-conceived while also clearly still rooted in classicism. The interior is better.

The front of the Post Office Savings Bank (top). Looking up into a stairwell (bottom).

If the prior paragraph seems to contradict itself, I'll agree with that. Inside the building there is a small museum in the rear of the main banking hall detailing the history of the competition for the building's design. The exhibit is organized around a reconstruction of one of the small banking halls which appears to be faithfully recreated but otherwise not spectacular. I found the competition part of the exhibit interesting in two respects: (1) Wagner technically broke the rules of the competition brief by combining spaces which were previously thought of as separate and distinct; and (2) I have never heard of any of the other entrants. 

I'm not sure if we were supposed to wander around the building on our own after we finished in the museum but we did a bit anyway in search of details and other nuggets of interest. The stairs are pretty cool. The detailing on the railings is awesome. These days of great architects custom designing and fabricating railings must have been amazing. There were several railing designs that I thought were cool in Vienna (including those at Karl Ehn's Karl Marx Hof).

But the room that made me weak in the knees was the main banking hall. This was the main public space in the building and was clearly (unless we didn't discover something amazing elsewhere) the most important and carefully designed space in the whole place. It is grand, it is well organized, it is functional and it is full of diffuse light due to the laylight and skylights above the room itself. For the early 20th century in a society used to dark, poorly lit workspaces, it must have been a revelation. It must have blown away the employees and the customers with its quality. And I say this because it blew me away in 2022.

Today, the main banking hall is a cafe. Or it was when we were there, although I get the impression it's probably some kind of multipurpose space when they are not serving drinks and snacks in the middle of the day. The cafe is a great idea by the way. I don't know how many works of modern architecture that I've been to where I've stared at nothing going on in the spaces that were once buildings for people to BE in but which are now museums. Being able to sit for a while with a beer and take everything in was super valuable.

I know earlier in this post I complained about the number of buildings in Vienna that were closed when we visited last month. I've also complained in this blog a lot about how many trips COVID forced us to re-schedule over the last couple of years. But honestly, if COVID hadn't hit Vienna last fall, we wouldn't have been able to visit the Post Office Savings Bank because until a couple of months ago, it was closed for renovations for over a year. Sometimes, bad luck works out.

The small banking hall (top) and view of the main banking hall (bottom).

It seemed to me when I returned from Vienna that our Jugendstil journey there was full of closed buildings and failed attempts at making it to landmarks big and small for a variety of reasons. Looking back at the length of this post and the number of pictures posted here, I'm not sure that's true. It may have been not what I would have done when I was in my late 20s or early 30s and obsessed with architecture trips, but I think we got a pretty comprehensive look at what was going on Art Nouveau-wise in Vienna at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries.

I am positive we missed a lot. I'm also positive I really have no regrets about our overall experience here. I think our Jugendstil quest was really pretty solid.

One final note: there is one place we managed to visit to fill in some gaps, including what must have at one time filled the offices and public spaces at the Post Office Savings Bank. That would be the furniture, of course. Just a short walk around the Ringstrasse you will find the MAK, Vienna's (and indeed, Austria's) museum dedicated the applied arts, including furniture making. At one time, architects managed to find the time to design furniture to fill the buildings they designed as well as the actual buildings. If you are interested in that sort of stuff, the MAK has an incredible collection of furniture designed by Josef Hoffman, the Thonets and a lot of stuff that Otto Wagner created, including desks, wardrobes, chairs and tables for the Post Office Savings Bank. I thought it was worth a visit to complete our Post Office Saving Bank experience. 

Wow that was a long post! That's all I got on this one!

Otto Wagner: Furniture from the Post Office Savings Bank. At the MAK, Vienna.

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How We Did It

There's a lot I could write about here. I'll try to be brief and concentrate on the four main buildings we actually visited on our trip in addition to some other resources I used when planning our time seeking out architecture in Vienna.

The Vienna Secession Building is open Tuesday through Sunday 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Like a lot of museums in Europe they are closed on Mondays but their late opening hours every other day of the week make up for it somewhat. I know I've plugged the Vienna City Card on my snow globe post but that card gets you a free audio guide tour of the building here. There are some holidays when the building is closed.

The Ernst Fuchs Museum is also open Tuesday through Sunday but 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Like the Secession Building they are also closed on certain holidays and like the Secession Building there is a benefit to flashing your Vienna City Card (3 Euro discount per person, here). Getting to the Ernst Fuchs Museum is not easy or convenient. We Ubered there (although we were asked by our driver if the museum was open...) and took the 52A or 52B (can't remember which; both run the same route) back to the U4 at the Hütteldorf station. The bus stop is right across the street from the Wagner Villa II, which is right next to the Fuchs Museum.

The Post Office Savings Bank Museum is open Monday through Friday 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. On Thursdays, they stay open an extra couple of hours until 8. The cafe in the main banking hall is on a similar schedule except they close at 6 on Thursdays and stay open until 8 on Fridays.

The MAK is open Tuesday through Sunday 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. with late opening (until 9) on Tuesday.

Finally, I found two websites essential to my research in getting to all these buildings: Vienna Unwrapped and Visiting Vienna. There are a number of posts on both websites related to architecture in general and Jugendstil in particular. I found both sites' articles particularly helpful in getting me to websites with opening hours.

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Gathered Together In A Cave And Grooving With A Pict

There is a town in Scotland, about two thirds of the way between Aberdeen and Dundee, named Aberlemno. In many respects to the casual passerby or passer through (that would be me, in this case), Aberlemno is no different than many other Scottish towns and villages out there. There are fields used for farming as far as the eye can see. The roads are seemingly all too narrow and are edged with earthen berms topped by low stone walls. Maybe there are some sheep here and there. And there is an astonishing lack of actual buildings around for people to live in, although there always seems to be a parish church of some type somewhere around.

We drove through Aberlemno on a Tuesday afternoon in June. Our passing through there was no accident. In fact, it was quite deliberate. Because, really, as much as Aberlemno might resemble a lot of other Scottish towns, in one respect it is actually quite remarkably different: if you drive to the right spots in Aberlemno, you will find some carved stones standing by the side of a road or in a churchyard which have been there for more than 1,200 years. That, to us, seemed like a good reason to visit on a Tuesday afternoon, especially since we happened to be traveling from Aberdeen to Edinburgh (and past Dundee) on that very same day anyway.

The four stones in Aberlemno that we made our way deliberately to visit were carved by a group of people called the Picts between (and I guess this is estimated) 500 and 800 C.E. They weren't the only stones carved by these people found there. There were at least two others, one of which was lost (I don't know how you lose a piece of stone taller than a person...) and one of which was relocated to a museum in Dundee. They are still looking for others.

Our planned stop in Aberlemno made me wonder...who were the Picts and what else is out there in Scotland that might have been left behind by these people? Turns out there's actually quite a bit of mystery surrounding the Picts. And they sure did leave a lot of stuff behind.

Detail, top back side of the Roadside Cross, Aberlemno.

If you had asked me before our trip to Scotland this year to sum up the last say couple of thousand years in that corner of the planet, I'm not really sure how good a job I could have done. I could probably have spit out something about Hadrian's Wall in the second century C.E. and probably could have thrown out names like Robert the Bruce and William Wallace before boldly claiming that Scottish resistance to English rule was brutally squashed at the Battle of Culloden. Beyond that? Railways and bridges and ships, maybe? Industrial revolution and all that stuff?

But the details and the timing of all that? Maybe not so clear. I might not even have been close to within a hundred years or so.

Now if you had really pushed me for some more details on this history stuff, I might have used words like Picts and paganism and Celts and Gaels and I might have intertwined and interrelated all these concepts. But honestly, I just wouldn't have had the faintest real clue. So faced with a town like Aberlemno where there was a real opportunity to fill in some giant gaps in my understanding of Scottish history...well, I was all in! I needed to know about these Picts. And I guess the Gaels and Celts too if they happened to be in the story.

Maclean's Cross, Iona.

So first of all, the Picts were not what they called themselves. Apparently, the name was what the Romans called the people living in the north of what is now Britain. You know, the part of the island that Rome could claim they conquered but then couldn't hold on to. The Picts (or whoever they really were) weren't much help here with their own name or names. They had a tendency to not write stuff down so whatever they were called as well as what they did or built and how they lived is all pretty much lost to history.

And there were Celts and Gaels in the mix here who may or may not have been the same people as the Picts. The Celts were a peoples who were living in the British Isles before anyone who kept any sort of history at all was around that part of the world. The Celts were just there in Britain at some point when other groups (like the Romans and the Vikings and the Normans) started showing up and trying to take over. The Gaels were from Ireland, but they definitely had a presence in Scotland, particularly on the west coast near...well...Ireland. Big surprise there. So yes...Picts, Celts and Gaels...all in Scotland at some point. But let's stick with the Picts for this post.

For some reason, and I know it's my own personal cultural bias in operation here, I assumed that the Picts north of The Wall (of Hadrian) were all pagans. Which is totally true. Long ago, before history was written down in northern Britain, the people living there worshipped nature and maybe gods long forgotten. There were certainly offerings and sacrifices (not saying human, necessarily) for things like good harvests, and they built rings of stones and other temple-like places to seemingly relate to things like the solstices.

At some point, paganism started to fade and Christianity made its way to the Picts. Not likely through written books translated into English or Olde English or any other sort of written language. Likely there were monks or missionaries or priests or saints (or whatever) that started to reach the people in the north and talk about Christ and the gospels and all that. Eventually, stuff began to stick.

Two of the stones at Aberlemno. The Serpent Stone (top) and the Roadside Cross (bottom).

In Aberlemno, you can see hints of all of this transition between religions and much more.

As you drive into town, there are a series of three large stones on the left hand side of the road, carved to various degrees of precision and detail. Two of the stones (known today as the Serpent Stone and the Crescent Stone) depict symbols from nature, one clearly marked at the top with a depiction of a snake and the other less clearly carved with some faint crescent shapes. Maybe the moon. Although the plaque next to the Crescent Stone does not make that speculation.

The third stone, and the most massive of the three, is an intricately carved cross with angels flanking either side of the shaft of the cross on the front of the stone. On the rear face of the stone, there are representations of a hunting scene along with a centaur gathering medicinal herbs and David saving his flock of sheep from a lion. At the top of the back side of the stone, there is the same crescent shape (shown above) found on the Crescent Stone and some Pictish symbols, similar to those found on the Serpent Stone.

If there's any evidence needed that the Picts were both pagan and Christian, to me it shows up clearly in these three stones. Two of the three are devoid of any reference to Christianity; the third is a clear mixture of the two. For me, though, the fact that these stones show a transition from paganism to Christianity isn't the point here. I mean it's cool as an indication of history, I guess, but that's not what I got out of our visit to Aberlemno.

The real beauty in these things for me is the fact that they have lasted more than 1,200 years and that they are carved so intricately by a peoples who must still have been using most of their waking hours just to stay alive. I can't imagine what the people who made these things would have thought if they knew someone in the 21st century from an ocean away was driving by in a rented Honda Jazz to look at what they carved. It staggers my imagination.

The Crescent Stone. The carvings are barely visible but it is like 1,500 years old or something.

If I was impressed by the three stones by the side of the road (and I was), I still had one more to see at the Aberlemno Parish Church in the middle of the graveyard. It was placed there after the church was built, rather than the church being built where the stone stood.

The churchyard stone is the most interesting of the four stones we saw in the town, not only due to the artistry and the intricacy of the carving but also for the historical document that it is. There is a large cross on one side of the stone which is carved in what I can only articulate as a Celtic design. The cross itself is filled in with patterning that looks sort of rope-like, much like the jewelry we saw in souvenir shops in Ireland almost three years ago. Animal figures fill in the space between the cross and the edge of the stone.

The other side depicts a battle scene, what historians believe might be the Battle of Dún Nechtain in the year 685, a battle waged between the Picts and the invading Northumbrians led by King Ecgfrith. The Picts, as carvers of the stone, clearly won. This scene represents not just a work of art but a story told by people who are no longer around to be able to relay their history. I know I just poo-pooed the historical nature of the other three stones but this one is way cooler. This shows an actual event, not just a change in religious representation or focus. I'm sure the battle was way more chaotic than the stone represents, by the way. And I'm sure King Ecgfrith didn't succumb to the raven attacking him in quite the way the stone shows.

The Churchyard Cross, front side and back side, Aberlemno.

Aberlemno was actually the last place on this trip that we visited to see stones that were carved by the Picts. In terms of quantity and variety, it was clearly the best. There was no other site we visited that had more than one. But we did see others that were perhaps better quality.

Aberlemno was the last Pictish stones site that we added to our itinerary. The first places I planned on this trip were the Hebridean islands of Islay, Mull and Lewis and as it turned out there are ancient Pictish stones on the Isle of Islay and on Iona just off the west coast of Mull. We actually started building our Pictish stones journey from those places and couldn't resist the quick detour off the Aberdeen to Edinburgh path once we found out about Aberlemno. Visiting a single stone doesn't tell the same sort of story as visiting four in one site, but I think there was still a lot of value in chasing these things down.

Perhaps the most famous and most important of the carvings we found was Maclean's Cross on the Island of Iona. Maclean's Cross was produced way, way later than the stones we found at Aberlemno. It was placed on Iona around the year 1500 as a marker for pilgrims on their way to Iona Abbey, one of the most important early centers of Christianity in Scotland. The cross is enormous and covered with carvings of patterns around a central picture of the crucifixion of Christ. Unlike the stones in Aberlemno, it's actually cross shaped. As a work of art, it's impressive, particularly in its size and detail. It's also probably most famous for being where it is as much as for what it is. Among its many claims to fame, Iona Abbey may have been the place where the Book of Kells, now prominently on display in Dublin's Trinity College, was written before it was moved to save it from potential raids by the Vikings.

The back side of Maclean's Cross, Iona.

I can't say if someone who knows way more about this subject has ever produced any sort of list of the best Pictish carved stones in Scotland or anything like that. If there is, I'm not sure what we saw at Aberlemno or Iona would make the list. Impressive? Sure. Even the fact that these things are still around today is impressive. But I'd have to think the first stone we looked for and found might stand a chance of making such a list. That stone would be the Kildalton Cross on the Isle of Islay.

I don't know what it is about the Kildalton Cross exactly that makes it so impressive, unless I just say it was everything about the Cross that blew me away. Of all the carvings we found on our trip, this was clearly the most complex and most well executed. Its form is a ring-headed or Celtic cross, a crucifix with a circle superimposed at the crossing of the two arms. It's massive and it's intact, which is super-impressive considering it dates from about the year 700, older by far than Maclean's Cross and perhaps even older than some of those at Aberlemno.

The decoration on the Cross is detailed with patterning and biblical scenes and the decoration is not only carved into the plane of the cross but also "attached" to the front of the cross. I guess "attached" is the right word, although maybe not if the Cross was carved from a single stone. It is a true work of art. It's also in the same spot it was originally erected in the courtyard of the former parish church of Kildalton. It's incredible that it's even in this spot still standing. The things this cross must have seen over the last 1200 or 1300 years...

Kildalton Cross, Islay.

There were two other factors working in favor of Kildalton Cross being the most impressive we saw in Scotland. First, the weather was perfect. The sun shining on the front side of the cross made every carved piece of the stone pop to life. I know it's superficial to credit sunlight as making a carving more memorable but it was absolutely true. We had great weather much of the time we were in Scotland but not at the exact times we were on Iona or in Aberlemno. The sun helped Kildalton Cross immensely.

Finally, Kildalton Cross is frustratingly challenging to get to. It's located past the three southern coast of Islay distilleries after the two lane paved road becomes a two-way, one lane road which is definitely a bit more overgrown and not-cleared than a lot of the other two-way, one lane roads we traveled down in Scotland. And there's actual traffic coming the other way and not exactly plentiful passing places. Make it all the way to the old parish church and your reward is the finest piece of Pictish carving we found in our limited search in Scotland. The journey definitely makes the payoff better.

The magnificent front of Kildalton Cross in full sunlight.

Our pilgrimage to find ancient Pictish carvings in Scotland was really a result of finding out that these sorts of works were in places where we were going anyway. We went to Islay to learn about whisky; we went to Mull to see wildlife; and we had to travel past Aberlemno on the way from one place we really wanted to go (Dunnottar Castle south of Aberdeen) to the final stop on our Scotland trip (Edinburgh). We thought taking a quick detour on Islay and Mull before hitting Aberlemno would string together some similar sights that would get us a little bit of exposure to a bit of history made by peoples whose history is mostly long forgotten. Or maybe it's preserved in what we saw and many other similar carvings that we didn't see.

In many ways, it would have been a better experience if we had made the trip in reverse and ended up on Islay last. It would, I think, have made Kildalton Cross that much more impressive. But that's not how we planned this trip and I have no regrets about doing it the way we did it. If I ever get back to Islay, I will have to go back to the old Kildalton Parish Church. Not holding my breath there. For now, I'll stick with the memory of 2022. 

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How We Did It

Of all the carved stones we found in Scotland, Aberlemno is probably the easiest to get to, if for no other reason that it's on mainland Britain. We just plugged in Aberlemno into our navigation app and after taking many lefts and rights on the (barely) two lane road to the town, we drove past three stones on the left hand side of the road. There's a parking lot just beyond the stones that has some informational signage and replica stone depicting the battle scene of the Churchyard Cross. Park the car, cross the road (remember traffic is on the left) and walk down to see the Roadside Cross, Crescent Stone and Serpent Stone. If you want to see these stones, better come when it's not winter; apparently they cover them in winter to protect the stones from the elements.

The parish church can be found by traveling a bit further north up the same road and taking a left toward the church. We didn't find any sort of parking at the church but just pulled over and accessed the courtyard. I'm not sure we parked legally but there was literally nobody in sight. No harm, no foul here.

Getting to Kildalton Cross and Maclean's Cross is a bit more involved because it will involve at least one boat and a combination of two more boats or planes. To get to Kildalton Cross, drive east from Port Ellen past Laphroaig, Lagavulin and Ardbeg distilleries and follow the signs to the Cross. There's also a walking trail on the south side of the road but it's a long walk all the way to the Cross.

We found Maclean's Cross by being dropped off at the ferry landing on Iona and walking straight up the hill and hanging a right after passing the ruins of the old nunnery. It's not much of a walk to the Cross and you can't realistically walk past it without missing it.

My understanding of the history of the Picts and the Gaels and the Celts and when they worshipped nature vs. Christ wasn't helped much by any of our visits to these sites. I managed to find a book called A Pocket History of Scotland at the Battle of Bannockburn Experience near Stirling which told me pretty much all I needed to know about Scottish history in an easy to read format. It cost me all of £5.99 and it's been worth its weight in gold. I can't remember buying a book this small for this low a price that has helped me so much, although I'll dispute the "pocket" label just a bit. Not saying I don't have pockets I can fit this book into, but I certainly have a lot of pockets that it won't fit into.

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