Questões de Inglês

THE LEOPOLD MUSEUM

By Thomas Trenkler

[1]    Numerous important art collectors lived in Vienna until Adolf Hitler seized power in March 1938. The most important among them were Alphonse
Rothschild, Prince Franz Josef II of Liechtenstein, the industrial magnate Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, the librettist Fritz Grünbaum as well as the dentist Heinrich
Rieger, who treated the destitute Egon Schiele in exchange for pictures. All of them were forced to emigrate or were murdered in the concentration camps.
The tradition of upper-middle-class patronage was generally not continued after World War II, and few new private collectors emerged. Among those who
did, Rudolf Leopold stood out from the rest. By the mid-1980s, his collection – primarily Austrian art from the Biedermeier period (1815-1848) to
Expressionism (the early decades of the 20^th century) – highlighted the deficiencies of the Austrian state collections.
[2]    Rudolf Leopold was born in Vienna in 1925, studied medicine in the post-war years, received his medical degree in 1953, and finally specialized in
ophthalmology. In 1947 he began to attend lectures on art history and to collect works of the 19^th century. At an auction [leilão] in 1950, he happened
upon [encontrou por acaso] a forgotten catalogue of Egon Schiele’s works, which had been published by the art dealer Otto Kallir-Nirenstein. Until 1938,
Kallir-Nirenstein had exhibited at his Neue Gallerie pictures by the most important Austrian artists of the modern period. Rudolf Leopold was excited by the
radical visual language of Schiele (1890-1918), whose art had been labeled “pornographic" in his own day. Leopold cared little about the lack of interest
that the international art world showed for Schiele and the disparaging [de menosprezo] opinion that most art historians held of his work. He acquired
practically every work of Schiele he could lay his hands on.
[3]    Leopold’s passion for collecting, which his wife Elizabeth shared, grew ever larger, bordering on fanaticism. In addition, he expanded the focus of his
collection to Jugendstil, an Austrian art period that flowered from the end of World War I until just after World War II. Leopold took out considerable bank
loans, offering masterpieces in his collection as collateral. His spacious home in the Viennese suburb of Grinzing slowly turned into an art warehouse.
Thousands of drawings were stored on cabinets and under beds, and multiple layers of paintings leaned against the walls. Because his house was filled far
beyond capacity and the mountain of debt had assumed dangerous levels, Leopold considered selling his collection to the Republic of Austria. In March
1989, on the occasion of the groundbreaking exhibition “Egon Schiele and his Time,” Chancellor [chief minister of the Austrian state] Franz Vranitzky
announced that negotiations for the acquisition of the collection would begin.
[4]    For a long time the negotiations failed to produce a satisfying result: Leopold’s expectations far exceeded the amount that had been considered by the
government. Furthermore, Leopold was unwilling to have his collection added to the holdings of a museum of Austrian modern art, demanding instead
that his life’s work be preserved as a distinct whole. Hans Dichand, the publisher of the newspaper Kronen Zeitung, turned out to be a powerful ally. The
widely read daily repeatedly called for the purchase of the collection.
[5]    However, in 1992 the Kronen Zeitung, together with the Freedom Party, launched a huge campaign against the government’s planned construction of
the MuseumsQuartier complex, which, even with downsizing, seemed too expensive. But Erhard Busek, then the minister of science, solved the impasse by
linking the two projects: in October 1993 the government announced that it would establish a separate Leopold Museum within the MuseumsQuartier,
which thus, to a certain extent, owes its existence to Rudolf Leopold. Since he had insisted on a new building for his vast collection, even the Kronen Zeitung
had to accept Busek’s solution.
[6]    In the early summer of 1994, after more bargaining, Leopold agreed to transfer his entire collection to a foundation and, in return, to receive 160 million
euros in a series of annual, indexed partial payments until May 2007. And in September 2001, scarcely three months after the official opening of the
MuseumsQuartier, the Leopold Museum opened as well.

Adapted from the book The Vienna Hofburg.

THE LEOPOLD MUSEUM

By Thomas Trenkler

[1]    Numerous important art collectors lived in Vienna until Adolf Hitler seized power in March 1938. The most important among them were Alphonse
Rothschild, Prince Franz Josef II of Liechtenstein, the industrial magnate Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, the librettist Fritz Grünbaum as well as the dentist Heinrich
Rieger, who treated the destitute Egon Schiele in exchange for pictures. All of them were forced to emigrate or were murdered in the concentration camps.
The tradition of upper-middle-class patronage was generally not continued after World War II, and few new private collectors emerged. Among those who
did, Rudolf Leopold stood out from the rest. By the mid-1980s, his collection – primarily Austrian art from the Biedermeier period (1815-1848) to
Expressionism (the early decades of the 20^th century) – highlighted the deficiencies of the Austrian state collections.
[2]    Rudolf Leopold was born in Vienna in 1925, studied medicine in the post-war years, received his medical degree in 1953, and finally specialized in
ophthalmology. In 1947 he began to attend lectures on art history and to collect works of the 19^th century. At an auction [leilão] in 1950, he happened
upon [encontrou por acaso] a forgotten catalogue of Egon Schiele’s works, which had been published by the art dealer Otto Kallir-Nirenstein. Until 1938,
Kallir-Nirenstein had exhibited at his Neue Gallerie pictures by the most important Austrian artists of the modern period. Rudolf Leopold was excited by the
radical visual language of Schiele (1890-1918), whose art had been labeled “pornographic" in his own day. Leopold cared little about the lack of interest
that the international art world showed for Schiele and the disparaging [de menosprezo] opinion that most art historians held of his work. He acquired
practically every work of Schiele he could lay his hands on.
[3]    Leopold’s passion for collecting, which his wife Elizabeth shared, grew ever larger, bordering on fanaticism. In addition, he expanded the focus of his
collection to Jugendstil, an Austrian art period that flowered from the end of World War I until just after World War II. Leopold took out considerable bank
loans, offering masterpieces in his collection as collateral. His spacious home in the Viennese suburb of Grinzing slowly turned into an art warehouse.
Thousands of drawings were stored on cabinets and under beds, and multiple layers of paintings leaned against the walls. Because his house was filled far
beyond capacity and the mountain of debt had assumed dangerous levels, Leopold considered selling his collection to the Republic of Austria. In March
1989, on the occasion of the groundbreaking exhibition “Egon Schiele and his Time,” Chancellor [chief minister of the Austrian state] Franz Vranitzky
announced that negotiations for the acquisition of the collection would begin.
[4]    For a long time the negotiations failed to produce a satisfying result: Leopold’s expectations far exceeded the amount that had been considered by the
government. Furthermore, Leopold was unwilling to have his collection added to the holdings of a museum of Austrian modern art, demanding instead
that his life’s work be preserved as a distinct whole. Hans Dichand, the publisher of the newspaper Kronen Zeitung, turned out to be a powerful ally. The
widely read daily repeatedly called for the purchase of the collection.
[5]    However, in 1992 the Kronen Zeitung, together with the Freedom Party, launched a huge campaign against the government’s planned construction of
the MuseumsQuartier complex, which, even with downsizing, seemed too expensive. But Erhard Busek, then the minister of science, solved the impasse by
linking the two projects: in October 1993 the government announced that it would establish a separate Leopold Museum within the MuseumsQuartier,
which thus, to a certain extent, owes its existence to Rudolf Leopold. Since he had insisted on a new building for his vast collection, even the Kronen Zeitung
had to accept Busek’s solution.
[6]    In the early summer of 1994, after more bargaining, Leopold agreed to transfer his entire collection to a foundation and, in return, to receive 160 million
euros in a series of annual, indexed partial payments until May 2007. And in September 2001, scarcely three months after the official opening of the
MuseumsQuartier, the Leopold Museum opened as well.

Adapted from the book The Vienna Hofburg.

THE LEOPOLD MUSEUM

By Thomas Trenkler

[1]    Numerous important art collectors lived in Vienna until Adolf Hitler seized power in March 1938. The most important among them were Alphonse
Rothschild, Prince Franz Josef II of Liechtenstein, the industrial magnate Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, the librettist Fritz Grünbaum as well as the dentist Heinrich
Rieger, who treated the destitute Egon Schiele in exchange for pictures. All of them were forced to emigrate or were murdered in the concentration camps.
The tradition of upper-middle-class patronage was generally not continued after World War II, and few new private collectors emerged. Among those who
did, Rudolf Leopold stood out from the rest. By the mid-1980s, his collection – primarily Austrian art from the Biedermeier period (1815-1848) to
Expressionism (the early decades of the 20^th century) – highlighted the deficiencies of the Austrian state collections.
[2]    Rudolf Leopold was born in Vienna in 1925, studied medicine in the post-war years, received his medical degree in 1953, and finally specialized in
ophthalmology. In 1947 he began to attend lectures on art history and to collect works of the 19^th century. At an auction [leilão] in 1950, he happened
upon [encontrou por acaso] a forgotten catalogue of Egon Schiele’s works, which had been published by the art dealer Otto Kallir-Nirenstein. Until 1938,
Kallir-Nirenstein had exhibited at his Neue Gallerie pictures by the most important Austrian artists of the modern period. Rudolf Leopold was excited by the
radical visual language of Schiele (1890-1918), whose art had been labeled “pornographic" in his own day. Leopold cared little about the lack of interest
that the international art world showed for Schiele and the disparaging [de menosprezo] opinion that most art historians held of his work. He acquired
practically every work of Schiele he could lay his hands on.
[3]    Leopold’s passion for collecting, which his wife Elizabeth shared, grew ever larger, bordering on fanaticism. In addition, he expanded the focus of his
collection to Jugendstil, an Austrian art period that flowered from the end of World War I until just after World War II. Leopold took out considerable bank
loans, offering masterpieces in his collection as collateral. His spacious home in the Viennese suburb of Grinzing slowly turned into an art warehouse.
Thousands of drawings were stored on cabinets and under beds, and multiple layers of paintings leaned against the walls. Because his house was filled far
beyond capacity and the mountain of debt had assumed dangerous levels, Leopold considered selling his collection to the Republic of Austria. In March
1989, on the occasion of the groundbreaking exhibition “Egon Schiele and his Time,” Chancellor [chief minister of the Austrian state] Franz Vranitzky
announced that negotiations for the acquisition of the collection would begin.
[4]    For a long time the negotiations failed to produce a satisfying result: Leopold’s expectations far exceeded the amount that had been considered by the
government. Furthermore, Leopold was unwilling to have his collection added to the holdings of a museum of Austrian modern art, demanding instead
that his life’s work be preserved as a distinct whole. Hans Dichand, the publisher of the newspaper Kronen Zeitung, turned out to be a powerful ally. The
widely read daily repeatedly called for the purchase of the collection.
[5]    However, in 1992 the Kronen Zeitung, together with the Freedom Party, launched a huge campaign against the government’s planned construction of
the MuseumsQuartier complex, which, even with downsizing, seemed too expensive. But Erhard Busek, then the minister of science, solved the impasse by
linking the two projects: in October 1993 the government announced that it would establish a separate Leopold Museum within the MuseumsQuartier,
which thus, to a certain extent, owes its existence to Rudolf Leopold. Since he had insisted on a new building for his vast collection, even the Kronen Zeitung
had to accept Busek’s solution.
[6]    In the early summer of 1994, after more bargaining, Leopold agreed to transfer his entire collection to a foundation and, in return, to receive 160 million
euros in a series of annual, indexed partial payments until May 2007. And in September 2001, scarcely three months after the official opening of the
MuseumsQuartier, the Leopold Museum opened as well.

Adapted from the book The Vienna Hofburg.

BILBIES AND FERAL CATS

[1]    More than 20 species of Australian mammals have been exterminated by feral cats. These predators, which arrived with the European settlers
[colonizadores], still threaten native wildlife – and are too abundant on the mainland to eliminate, as has been achieved on some small Australian islands
that were previously infested with them. But Alexandra Ross of the University of New South Wales thinks she has come up with a different way to deal with
the problem. As she writes in a paper in the Journal of Applied Ecology, she is giving feline-attentiveness lessons to wild animals involved in re-introduction
programs, in order to try to make them more aware of the dangers of feral cats.
[2]    Many Australian mammals, though not actually extinct, are confined to fragments of cat-free habitat. That offers the possibility of taking colonists
from these refuges to places where a species once existed but now is no longer found. This will, however, put the enforced migrants back in the sights of
the cats that caused the problem in the first place. Training the migrants while they are in captivity, using models of cats and the sorts of sounds cats make,
has proved expensive and ineffective. Ms. Ross therefore wondered whether putting them in large naturalistic enclosures might serve as a form of trainingcamp to prepare them for introduction into their new, cat-infested homes.
[3]    She tested this idea on bilbies, a small Australian mammal that superficially resembles a rabbit. She and her colleagues raised a couple of hundred
bilbies in a huge enclosure that also contained five feral cats. As a control, she raised a nearly identical population in a similar enclosure without the cats.
She left the animals to get on with their lives for two years, which, given that bilbies breed four times a year and live for around eight years, was a
substantial period for them. After some predation and presumably some learning she selected 21 bilbies from each enclosure, fitted radio transmitters to
them and released them into a third enclosure that had ten hungry cats in it. She then monitored what happened next.
[4]    The upshot [resultado, conclusão] was that the training worked. Over the subsequent 40 days, ten of the untrained animals were eaten by cats, but
only four of the trained ones. One particular behavioral difference she noticed was that bilbies brought up in a predator-free environment were much more
likely to sleep alone than were those brought up around cats. And when cats are around, sleeping alone is dangerous.
[5]    How the bilbies that have undergone this extreme training will survive in the wild remains to be seen. But Ms. Ross has at least provided reason for
hope.

Adapted from The Economist, May 18th 2019. 

BILBIES AND FERAL CATS

[1]    More than 20 species of Australian mammals have been exterminated by feral cats. These predators, which arrived with the European settlers
[colonizadores], still threaten native wildlife – and are too abundant on the mainland to eliminate, as has been achieved on some small Australian islands
that were previously infested with them. But Alexandra Ross of the University of New South Wales thinks she has come up with a different way to deal with
the problem. As she writes in a paper in the Journal of Applied Ecology, she is giving feline-attentiveness lessons to wild animals involved in re-introduction
programs, in order to try to make them more aware of the dangers of feral cats.
[2]    Many Australian mammals, though not actually extinct, are confined to fragments of cat-free habitat. That offers the possibility of taking colonists
from these refuges to places where a species once existed but now is no longer found. This will, however, put the enforced migrants back in the sights of
the cats that caused the problem in the first place. Training the migrants while they are in captivity, using models of cats and the sorts of sounds cats make,
has proved expensive and ineffective. Ms. Ross therefore wondered whether putting them in large naturalistic enclosures might serve as a form of trainingcamp to prepare them for introduction into their new, cat-infested homes.
[3]    She tested this idea on bilbies, a small Australian mammal that superficially resembles a rabbit. She and her colleagues raised a couple of hundred
bilbies in a huge enclosure that also contained five feral cats. As a control, she raised a nearly identical population in a similar enclosure without the cats.
She left the animals to get on with their lives for two years, which, given that bilbies breed four times a year and live for around eight years, was a
substantial period for them. After some predation and presumably some learning she selected 21 bilbies from each enclosure, fitted radio transmitters to
them and released them into a third enclosure that had ten hungry cats in it. She then monitored what happened next.
[4]    The upshot [resultado, conclusão] was that the training worked. Over the subsequent 40 days, ten of the untrained animals were eaten by cats, but
only four of the trained ones. One particular behavioral difference she noticed was that bilbies brought up in a predator-free environment were much more
likely to sleep alone than were those brought up around cats. And when cats are around, sleeping alone is dangerous.
[5]    How the bilbies that have undergone this extreme training will survive in the wild remains to be seen. But Ms. Ross has at least provided reason for
hope.

Adapted from The Economist, May 18th 2019. 

BILBIES AND FERAL CATS

[1]    More than 20 species of Australian mammals have been exterminated by feral cats. These predators, which arrived with the European settlers
[colonizadores], still threaten native wildlife – and are too abundant on the mainland to eliminate, as has been achieved on some small Australian islands
that were previously infested with them. But Alexandra Ross of the University of New South Wales thinks she has come up with a different way to deal with
the problem. As she writes in a paper in the Journal of Applied Ecology, she is giving feline-attentiveness lessons to wild animals involved in re-introduction
programs, in order to try to make them more aware of the dangers of feral cats.
[2]    Many Australian mammals, though not actually extinct, are confined to fragments of cat-free habitat. That offers the possibility of taking colonists
from these refuges to places where a species once existed but now is no longer found. This will, however, put the enforced migrants back in the sights of
the cats that caused the problem in the first place. Training the migrants while they are in captivity, using models of cats and the sorts of sounds cats make,
has proved expensive and ineffective. Ms. Ross therefore wondered whether putting them in large naturalistic enclosures might serve as a form of trainingcamp to prepare them for introduction into their new, cat-infested homes.
[3]    She tested this idea on bilbies, a small Australian mammal that superficially resembles a rabbit. She and her colleagues raised a couple of hundred
bilbies in a huge enclosure that also contained five feral cats. As a control, she raised a nearly identical population in a similar enclosure without the cats.
She left the animals to get on with their lives for two years, which, given that bilbies breed four times a year and live for around eight years, was a
substantial period for them. After some predation and presumably some learning she selected 21 bilbies from each enclosure, fitted radio transmitters to
them and released them into a third enclosure that had ten hungry cats in it. She then monitored what happened next.
[4]    The upshot [resultado, conclusão] was that the training worked. Over the subsequent 40 days, ten of the untrained animals were eaten by cats, but
only four of the trained ones. One particular behavioral difference she noticed was that bilbies brought up in a predator-free environment were much more
likely to sleep alone than were those brought up around cats. And when cats are around, sleeping alone is dangerous.
[5]    How the bilbies that have undergone this extreme training will survive in the wild remains to be seen. But Ms. Ross has at least provided reason for
hope.

Adapted from The Economist, May 18th 2019.