Albert Christoph Dies, Leopoldine Temple with Pond, Park of Schloss Eisenstadt, 1807, detail (Esterházy Privatstiftung, Schloss Eisenstadt)
Photograph: © Liechtenstein Museum: Die Fürstlichen Sammlungen, Vienna

The “French Wall” in the Oasen der Stille exhibition installation
Photograph: © Liechtenstein Museum: Die Fürstlichen Sammlungen, Vienna

A gallery installation from the Oasen der Stille exhibition in the Liechtenstein garden palace
Photograph: © Liechtenstein Museum: Die Fürstlichen Sammlungen, Vienna

Oasen der Stille exhibition vitrines in the library of the Liechtenstein garden palace
Photograph: © Liechtenstein Museum: Die Fürstlichen Sammlungen, Vienna

Exhibition Review

Oasen der Stille: Die grossen Landschaftsgärten in Mitteleuropa

Curators: Johann Kräftner, Alexandra Hanzl

Liechtenstein Museum Wien
6 June to 18 November 2008

PDF version
In recent years several exhibitions on gardens have taken place which dealt with the representation of gardens in the fine arts or literature in a broader context. The exhibition Oasen der Stille (Oases of Tranquillity) also took this approach as it focused on “The Great Landscape Gardens of Central Europe,” according to the subtitle. It merits special attention since it treated the most important landscape gardens in Eastern Austria and Moravia for the first time on the basis of material from the Lichtensteins’ private archives and art collection. The subtitle is misleading in a sense, however, since there are other important landscape gardens in Central Europe such as Muskau or Veltrusy which are not documented in the Liechtenstein archives.

The large Liechtenstein gardens but also those of other aristocratic families like Esterházy, Schönborn, Harrach, Schwarzenberg, and Lacy as well as the imperial Habsburg dynasty were presented in the former ladies’ apartments and the library of the Liechtenstein garden palace which now houses the Liechtenstein museum. The objects on display such as paintings, drawings, books, porcelain and historical garden tools—mostly owned by the Liechtenstein family—are of high value and gave an excellent impression of the gardens. Following an introduction with the somewhat hackneyed title “Back to Nature,” various gardens were presented with each section of the exhibition displayed on one wall. The garden at the Liechtenstein summer palace in Vienna, for instance, served as an example to demonstrate the transformation of a geometric garden into a landscape garden. The Liechtensteins’ Moravian garden retreats in Eisgrub and Feldsberg (today: Lednice and Valtice) as well as the Esterházys’ “Eisenstädter Kulturlandschaft” and the imperial park of Laxenburg filled considerable parts of the exhibition. One of the highlights was undoubtedly Peter Joseph Lenné’s “Verschönerungsplan” for Laxenburg dating back to 1815, but rediscovered only in 2000. Unfortunately, the accompanying gallery text stated “Das Gartenareal wurde von Jospeh Lenné [sic] nach englischem Vorbild modernisiert [...],” although Lenné’s plan was in fact never executed (as stated correctly in the catalogue).

The exhibition featured a remarkable focus on architecture, especially folies. Important topics of landscape gardens, however, such as plants and their usage, plants as design elements, color, routing, or even vistas were covered only marginally or not at all.

The section entitled “Documentation of Flora and Fauna in the Properties of the Liechtensteins” displayed assets from the Liechtenstein archives in the historical library. A particularly outstanding group of objects here was the “Hortus Botanicus” (1776-1804), a florilegium in fourteen volumes with about 2700 gouaches. Uniform labelling for the historical prints and drawings of plants would have been preferable, though. For some objects the identification was incomplete, for instance the etching labelled only “Cedrat muscati, 18. Jh. Kupferstich” is from Johann Christoph Volkamer, Continuation der Nürnbergische Hesperiden, Nürnberg, 1714, p. 61.

In terms of venue and exhibition installation, the Liechtenstein garden palace in Vienna’s present-day Rossau district, constructed at the end of the seventeenth century, is surely an ideal place for such an exhibition. Reopened in 2004, it maintains the private character of a princely art collection. Probably to reinforce this private character, the curators chose not to label the exhibits in the ladies’ apartments. Instead, these were assigned numbers, and the relevant information could be found in thematic texts on a series of laminated sheets the visitor could carry through the galleries; these sheets also contained short introductory essays to each theme. This turned out to be far more inconvenient than the museum’s earlier practice of handing out informational booklets to visitors. The “French Wall” in one of these galleries was aesthetically appealing, yet details of paintings hanging too high were difficult to see.

The plates in the catalogue are of excellent quality. Similar care would have been desirable with regard to editing the text. “Didaktische Klappseiten, die den Vorher-Nachher-Effekt zelebrieren” (catalogue, p. 13) had not been used in Hirschfeld’s Theorie der Gartenkunst, but – as demonstrated in the exhibition – in Pückler-Muskau’s Andeutungen über Landschaftsmalerei, modelled on the Red Books of Humphrey Repton. Jacquin was not the director of the imperial gardens of Schönbrunn (p. 21), but was in charge of the botanical study and indexing of the plants there. And although Engelbert Kaempfer published his Flora Japonica already in 1712, exotic buildings in the gardens at the end of the eighteenth century did not (yet) have their prototypes in Japan (catalogue, p. 29ff.), but only in China. Furthermore, terms such as “Voluptuarbauten” can be regarded as uncommon in garden history literature. The expertise of garden historians could have avoided such inaccuracies in the preparation of the texts for both the exhibition and the catalogue.

Oasen der Stille was based on the holdings of a private archive. One hopes it provides an impetus for further projects on historic gardens using other private collections and archives which are likely to contain important visual, textual, and material documentation on aristocratic gardens.

Publication related to the exhibition:
Johann Kräftner, ed. Oasen der Stille, Wien: Christian Brandstätter Verlag, 2008, 166 pp., approximately 260 color and 85 b/w illus., € 18, ISBN: 978-3-85033-231-6.

Claudia Gröschel
Vienna