In today's world of trends and needs to share existential experiences, doubts, feelings, joys, and impressions of all that we see or hear, I would like to draw others' attention to my impressions of a museum I recently discovered.


It's about the museum in Austria, an eclectic city that combines many eras and styles, a city where you come as a guest with a certain amount of knowledge and plunge every day into the culture, new knowledge, and aesthetic beauty at every corner. You leave the city much fuller. Yes, this is Vienna we're talking about. And one of the corners with cultural experiences on Hanuschgasse 3 is the Heidi Horten Collection Museum. Such a multifaceted collection.

Every corner of every floor gives you a different new art direction, period, and emotion. Among the XX – XXI century collections are different art movements and trends, on one floor in the left corner you see Vienna 1900, going a little to the right the surrealism of René Magritte, going up a notch higher German Expressionism, and then you are added a little more intense emotion by being introduced to European and Post-war American abstraction, existential works by Francis Bacon, works by the ZERO group of artists, and in one of the last rooms you experience catharsis when you stop in front of the incredibly colorful, calm, harmonious and peaceful painting “Near Bruges” by David Hockney.


The delicate azure background with colorful butterflies of The Damien Hirst painting “Love, Love, Love” hypnotizes you to come closer, waking up in front of the painting you look around, you see the iconic Jean-Michel Basquiat “Mr. Greedy” and Andy Warhol “Mickey Mouse”, many other works are just as good, but then you involuntarily raise your head up and find a wall towering upwards hung with many paintings. Let's go to the second floor, because there you are greeted by double-sided paintings framed by mirrors by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, “Female Nude Reading” (verso), and Erich Heckel .“Dangast Landscape” (recto), then the attention falls on the favorite pop art, Roy Lichtenstein's “Forest Scene” and Alex Katz's “Man with Towel”, but then all the attention is absorbed by two paintings. The first painting of one of my favorite art movements, Abstract Expressionism, is by the artist Mark Rothko, “Composition”, and the second painting is by the artist of New Realism, (Performance) Yves Klein, “RE1 (Relief éponge bleu). I would like to describe these two paintings in more depth, delving a little into the details. These works left a special aftertaste after viewing the exhibition.


Work by Yves Klein (1928-1962), one of the brightest and most colorful representatives of Performance Art, the artist who patented his signature pigment International Klein Blue, who created iconic works of art combining painting, sculpture, and performance, and who used live, nude women covered in paint rather than standard brushes. The work ̈RE1 ̈ is a large-sized canvas. This special pigment of the painting feels like a pleasant dazzle, like coming back from a walk in the bright sunshine. As soon as you go indoors, you are blinded, and your eyes see everything differently, and it's as if the sunlight is still with you. So this color, after moving on to other paintings, keeps flashing in your subconscious and your eyes, and then in the photo gallery of your phone.

The following is a masterpiece of Abstract Expressionism, a movement of artists born after World War II in the US, painting on large canvases, fast and energetic, a little rebellious, with large brushes, appealing to the subconscious and expressing their emotions, thoughts, experiences, and reflections to the world without the involvement of reason. The first American art, combining screaming, expression, non-figurativeness from abstraction, and expressiveness of forms from expressionism.
Mark Rothko (1903-1970) - American painter, intellectual, a founder of the New York School of painting, Color Field painting, and Abstract Expressionism.


His work consisted of 3 periods: figurative, surrealistic, and color-form. The artist used the direct impact of color on the viewer, with emotion as the main focus in the paintings. In the 1950s, he finally abandoned subject painting as a reaction to experiencing the tragedy of World War II. The artist expressed emotions through color. He studied the influence of color on the
human psyche: in his soul, he wanted people to experience the same strong emotions in front of his painting as when listening to music.


We see before us a canvas of rather small size, but a very deep meditative work, which in the title contains only “Composition”, but no more, so that the viewer can see and feel his emotions and see something of his own, not limiting himself to the title of the painting without searching in it what the title says. The viewer is left alone with the painting. The light from the painting falls on you as if you were drowning; the coral and scarlet colors seem to glow, dazzling you and, at the same time, drawing you into the painting, and the black color creates a multi-layered depth.

From art, especially from a properly selected collection of art, we see the impact on the human soul, how creativity changes the viewer, because once we are in front of special paintings and experience the emotions that the artist originally put in the work and that he experienced himself, we will not be the same. But the mystery remains why each person is emotionally touched by quite different periods and art pieces. The most interesting thing is that interest in this or that direction also depends on the specific period of life, which is experienced by a person being among the paintings, in what emotional state he is, whether in balance or imbalance, whether he is reflecting or harmoniously strolling through the halls of the museum.

Some will freeze in front of a painting by Francis Bacon or Lucian Freud, reaching for Existential Art, others for the Abstract Expressionism of Mark Rothko. And some will want to savor the Pop Art of David Hockney. But will that mean they feel that way now, or will it mean they are missing it and want to tap into that emotion? Regardless of what emotions you are feeling right now, in a museum on one of the main streets of Vienna, by turning off the main street onto a secondary street and passing through an archway you can find yourself in the very place, Heidi Horten Collection Museum, that will permeate you with emotions from head to toe and plunge you into the very feelings that you are filled with or lacking. And you will come out of there already a different and renewed person.