The campaign is sensational. From the outset, it seems incomprehensible to you that a museum like the Leopold, in Vienna, could have committed the clumsiness that one of his paintings is completely crooked, visibly crooked, obscenely crooked. One? No! That one is crooked too. And that one, and that one. You notice that, below them, some decreasing letters (in the angle left by the paintings) alert about “a few degrees more”, a few degrees more, which seem to be the ones that affect the horizontality of those masterpieces.
It is not an error. It is a fantastic campaign, with which the Viennese museum tries to warn of what effects climate change is going to have on some of the landscapes represented there, adding to the purely artistic beauty and meaning of the works the environmental story.
Under Lake Attersee, a wonder by Gustav Klimt from 1900, it is explained that an increase of just 2ºC in the average temperature of the planet would alter the level of oxygen in the water, lower its level and encourage the proliferation of algae, with which the water would stop being blue as in the painting to mutate to green.
Under the Sunset that Egon Schiele painted in 1913, the alert increases to 5º: this increase would devastate Austria, with less fine and melancholic rain and a progressive increase in torrential downpours, something that is already happening in many inhabited areas of Europe.
Now, of course, I should advise you not to even think of going to the Leopold, unless you are already in Vienna or are traveling there by bicycle.
