Private Themed Tour of the Exhibition 'From Monet to Picasso' with an Art Historian. 2.5 hours / Tickets included

You'll walk through the halls of a major Austrian museum to look at famous paintings from the late 19th and early 20th centuries and understand the trends, concepts, terms and techniques of modern art. I will explain to you why the practice of self-comment was so important for modernist and avant-garde artists, and we'll do a little experiment: compare your perception of paintings on first impressions, after reading the author's commentary, and finally the critic's commentary. You get a sense for yourself of how much more important it can be to put a work into context, rather than its artistic value. The paintings of Renoir, Monet, Picasso, Bacon, Kandinsky and Malevich which you can view in the Albertina did not come into being from scratch. It absorbed the artistic legacy of the past and therefore the paintings of these masters call for pleasure and contemplation. But with their arrival, the paradigm of art itself has already changed and new techniques have provoked the public into making statements such as, "My child could do this too", which penalises contemporary art. You'll learn to compare works from different eras and understand the differences in artistic attitudes, you'll understand what an "intellectual challenge" is in the context of art, and you'll probably get a little more insight into contemporary art as well.