We are up and out pretty rikky-tick quick to meet Monica at the Leopold Museum located behind the Kunsthistoriches-dominated Museum Quarter. (Ie. Tram D.) This place is Mecca for Viennese art nouveau and the Expressionists.

We’re talking Klimt’s Death and Life, and a myriad of works by Schiele , Werner, Kokoshka, Gerstl, Boeckl, Barlach, Pauser, Schad, and others, all on the top of four floors. All of us especially enjoy the photograph of Klimt looking disheveled, holding his cat.

Sooooo much nouveau and expressionism that we break for a Negroni and cafe lunch before descending to floor “minus-one” for the “Realist and Rebel Gustav Courbet” retrospective of 130 exhibits from every period of the man’s work, including the painting we will not include in this blog, which was commissioned by the Ottoman diplomat Halil Serif Pasha (possibly to depict his mistress Constance Queniaux, a Paris Opera dancer). The 1866 painting was not publicly shown before 1988: a long history of “under wraps and behind closed doors.” Needless to say, it is graphic: “The Origin of Life.”

Courbet, for all his narcissism, was capable of painting just about any genre in new ways: portraits (men women, noble, bourgeois, dressed or nude), landscapes (seashores, forests, countrysides, sunsets, etc.), still lifes, hunting scenes … all in styles as widely ranging as beaux-arts to cubist.

Great exhibition.

The Leopold IMHO rivals the Batliner collection at the Albertina. But we spent only three hours because we had bought tickee for the two-o’clock English-language tour of Freud’s house, which was systematically appropriated and pillaged by the Nazis in 1938.

Our guide could not have been better. Dark, wild hair like Elon Schiele, he doubled the hour tour, imparting with passion not just the facts of what happened in Freud’s rooms but, with deeply researched examples, the ways that Freud’s ideas changed the world he lived in: by bringing an attitude of science to bear on “the mind,” by emancipating women, by encouraging artists of many disciplines to express their visions in daring new ways … in a way, by extending Socrates notion that “the unexamined life is not worth living.”

Back to the apartment for Hendricks and tonic and then a three-block walk (our apartment was in a terrific location in many ways) to Rebhuhn for dinner with Daniel and Monica. The restaurant is an old one and known for serving a “true” Weiner Schnitzel (meaning actually made with Veal and fried in a pan rather than deep fried).

Delicious. But we must say, portions are … ahh … fabulous would be a good word.

Full from the night’s dinner and the week’s Viennese delights, we return to the apartment to pack our bags in preparation to visit Schonbrunn Palace tomorrow after taking the metro and offloading our bags into the trunk of a Skoda we reserved at a Sixte.