Anna's Study Abroad 2024

  This is a picture of me as we walked to visit the Albertina in Vienna. It was seriously one of my favorite art museums I have been to on this trip because the majority of art was post impressionism and beyond. There was one piece, my opinion, that stood out from the rest. It was called: Gebirgslandschaft mit Automobil, or Mountain Landscape with Automobile. It was done by Franz Sedlacek in 1931. I attached a picture of the painting as well. It was so jarring because the style is highly reminiscent of 2D animated films, yet it was done in oil. The mountains, pathways, and bridge are in no way realistic in structure, but they create balance and movement that direct our eyes to the car. The bright red automobile pops out significantly in the dreary landscape. Part of this style is created by making the shadows and backlighting highly dramatic. I literally sat and stared at it for a good ten minutes.  So why in the wide world is this important? From what I gather, it was importa...

We had a really moving day on Sunday and I wanted to take about the story of Louisa Gregor! She was born in 1862 and started taking piano lessons at age 6. She was a highly gifted pianist and even played for the zar of Russia four years later when she was ten! When she reached twelve, she started composing and one of her teaches said that she was the real thing. Her music life slowed down when she got married and proceeded to have three sons, however, she still continued to teach and preform on the side. After a rough divorce, she used music to wholly support herself! She was well liked and managed to get by and write some beautiful pieces. The sad part is that right across the street from where she lived, a Nazi organization Aktion T4 at Tiergartenstrasse was becoming highly involved with the idea of eugenics and creating an elite race. This meant killing or sterilizing all those who were intellectually disabled, autistic, gay, deaf, depressed, elderly, and more. When Louisa got put i...

After the Berlin wall came down, there was a big debate on how to remember Germany’s  horrible role in the murdering of just about six million Jews. A British architect came up with the structure for this memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe using undulating hills and rigid blocks of varied heights. At first it seems small and shallow, but as you walk in, you find yourself surrounded with towering blocks of concrete. It created a thought provoking landscape that is unique to the individual. This was the aim of the British architect. He wanted people to come here and get what they needed out of the experience. It essentially provides a space to think and a landscape for us to project on. So what was my reaction? To me the blocks of concrete represented both Nazi ideals or institutions, and secondly the staggering, resultant deaths of millions caused by the Nazi regime. It was almost like they visually showed the weight and consequence of that time. It felt oppressive as you walke...

Käthe Kollwitz is regarded as one of the most well known women artists of her time, and is still quite famous for her work. She was born in 1847 into a facility with rather progressive parents. Her father who was trained as a doctor but worked in construction recognized her artistic talent early on and encouraged it. She was able to study in her early ears and even attend schooling for women artists. She realized that she wasn’t a fan of color, but she was a master of lighting, movement and line and so she focused on charcoal, lithography, and sculpture. She married a doctor who worked things out so that he could sometimes be helping in the home so that Käthe could continue to pursue her already successful art career. They had three kids and she believed that having children helped her art and her art helped her be a better mother. That is a beautiful sentiment to me. Expressionist themes of motherhood and children, protection, and pacifism were all over her later works—her earlier rea...

  This is me next to the statue of Lise Meitner at a local university in Berlin Germany. She was born in Austria in the October of 1878 and was the second woman there to graduate in physics, but because she couldn’t get a lab space because of her gender, her work took her to Berlin. She had some influential friends help get her a space, but it really was just a wood shop. She was a brilliant woman and an outstanding scientist. She and her partners, both named Otto, discovered nuclear fission by bombarding Protactinium 231. And she started gaining some recognition but once WWII started she lost everything. She was a Jew and fled to Sweden. She continued her work and over the course of her life was nominated 49 times for the Nobel prize but never received it. Frustratingly her partner Otto did receive it. The most admirable thing is that she was invited to work on the Manhattan project but she refused because she had the foresight to understand the consequences that project would ent...

This is the Skansen Open Air Museum in Stockholm, Sweden! It was the first open air museum of its kind. Its end goal is to preserve the folk culture of Sweden. It started with just houses that showed how people of the past lived. From there it added other things such as a Glass blower house, pottery, bakeries, markets, a book printer, concerts, and folk dancing! It shows the many different eras of Swedish history, not just one. We also walked around the zoo which was so fun. My favorite animal was probably the seals. We also tried to see the folk dancing, but couldn’t find it. I did eat a donut at the market and it was the most delicious thing that I had ever had. I liked how they included a market because this was a tradition of the past that they mixed with the present. That is the whole idea of this park. This open air museum is very culturally important because it is essentially preserving many different time periods of Swedish culture at once. This helps visitors to get a better g...