Grotesque Baroque

Altenburg Abbey had “fallen into an almost hopeless state” (exhibition director Rupert Feuchtmüller) following its closure during the Second World War and the occupation by Soviet troops. However, as early as 1956, the show “Baroque Art from Waldviertel Monasteries” was shown in the Imperial Rooms, the renovation of the collegiate church was completed, but much was still unrestored.

The next major exhibition followed in 1963 with the provincial exhibition “Paul Troger and Austrian Baroque Art”; the library and ballroom had been restored for the occasion.

Twelve years later, in 1975, Altenburg Abbey hosted a Lower Austrian provincial exhibition for the second time. After five years of work, the abbey succeeded in restoring the Sala terrena, located beneath the imperial rooms, to its former glory. Abbot Ambros Griebling was delighted with the successful renovation: “When visitors to the provincial exhibition ‘Grotesque Baroque’ walk through these rooms, no one will suspect that this was once the storage area for the economy, that sacks of artificial fertilizer were stacked here and barley meal was produced. On top of that, a decade uninterested in grotesque frescoes had whitewashed the rooms and only here and there a putti's face or the eye of a dolphin peeped out.”

The historian and building director of the monastery, Father Gregor Schweighofer, had suggested the exhibition theme. This was not only to celebrate the completion of the restoration work, but also because there was a spiritual mission in the recovery of these rooms: to trace connections and present them for a wider circle of art lovers to understand.

What is the significance of the grotesque, which initially arouses disbelief in a monastery? The 1975 state exhibition was not just about the grotesque, but “about a spiritual phenomenon that is to be treated in the context of the entire monastery complex; it is about the Baroque world as it presents itself to us in the spiritual complex of Altenburg. It is about the world, about death and eternal life, whereby it is noticeable that the other last things, judgment and hell, are actually only alluded to here and there, through the decoration with trumpets in the crypt or through the vision of the Apocalypse in the collegiate church” (Rupert Feuchtmüller).

This provincial exhibition “Grotesque Baroque” was not so much intended to instruct, but rather to encourage the more than 146,000 visitors to reflect on the objects and their imagery: about this world and about the people who created these images within themselves and held their creations up to reality.

Altenburg Abbey