MAK and Cafe Prueckel in Vienna
After the three of us spent one last day in Vienna together, on Saturday it was time for Therese and I to say good-bye to our friend Faith. Her flight was early in the morning, leaving us to occupy ourselves for the rest of the day. It would be a travel day for us, but our flight to Krakow, Poland would not be until pretty late in the afternoon. So we decided to make it one more museum day, visiting MAK, Vienna’s museum of applied arts.
We always enjoy seeing textiles and ceramics and furniture, and there was plenty of that to see in MAK. What makes this museum unique at first blush is the way the different themed galleries are designed: in the Asian Collection and Rug Collection, for example, they have brought in an outside artist to design the gallery and work with the curator in placing the pieces of art. In the former instance, artist Tadashi Kawamata has created very rough-looking wooden shelves – they reminded me of the kinds of crates in which art might be transported.
MAK’s Asian Collection
For the Rug Collection, architect and designer Michael Embacher has come up with a whimsical way of displaying the rugs, hanging them from the ceiling by wires, so that they are overlapped and appear almost to be floating. I don’t know if he wished to evoke flying carpets, but that was how it looked to me.
MAK’s Rug Collection Exhibition
The overall effect is to infuse the collections with variety. Which is certainly a good thing, because the rooms themselves are fairly plain. On the other hand, the museum’s central courtyard and vaulted ceiling are both very attractive.
We snuck in one special exhibit before lunch, a kind of retrospective of the work of illustrator/graphic designer Christoph Niemann. What a breath of fresh air! I didn’t know it, but I have seen lots of his work on the cover and inside of the New Yorker magazine over the years.
Christoph Niemann Illustration
I loved looking at his various collections, especially “I Lego New York,” where Lego toys stand in for numerous typical things one finds in the Big Apple, our home.
Having seen all the museum’s permanent collections and the fun Niemann collection, we were ready for some lunch. It look us a few minutes to the find the MAK cafe – it is on the lowest level of the museum, with most of the seating outside (for warm months I guess). We found a seat, only to be told by the waiter that the cafe was no longer serving lunch. We were disgruntled, but luckily, a woman at the entrance desk led us to a nearby cafe for our lunch, the Cafe Prueckel.
Cafe Prueckel
Therese read reviews of the restaurant as we were waiting to order, and the consensus among those who had eaten there previous to us matched our experience to a tea. The food wasn’t bad – I had a “schnitzel natur” which means that they don’t bread the cutlet of meat, pairing it instead with some veal gravy and boiled potatoes.
Schnitzel Natur at Cafe Prueckel
But the service at Cafe Prueckel was very poor. We just wanted to get a quick bite and then get back to the museum to finish our time there before we had to get to the airport. Each time we needed something, we waited and waited. The young lady who was our waitress could not have been more blase if she had been a real zombie. When it came time for us to pay, we sat and waited for her to come to ask if we wanted dessert, and then we saw her walking down the street, leaving the restaurant. She clocked out in the middle of serving us! Not impressive.
We headed back to MAK for a little more time, to see the special collections, which were connected to the Vienna Biennale. I have to say, maybe it was that after a week of museums, I was burned out on museums. But these exhibits seemed overworked and heavy-handed and not pleasant at all. The overall theme was cities, as in what is going to happen to our cities in the future? Lots of idealism and doom and gloom there. Not the kind of thing to close our afternoon on, at least not for me.
Oh well. There can be such a thing as too much culture, I guess. We were ready to say good-bye to Vienna and move on to Krakow, a place neither of us had ever been, which promised to be eye-opening and fun.
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