Sissi, do you know? Maybe not that much! This woman was avant-garde and Vienna decided, all this March, to reverse the rustling icon version Romy Schneider to recall Elisabeth of Austria, the real one. You had to dare.
So since the 1er March and for the month of women, a new portrait is displayed at the Imperial Palace in Vienna. A poem format portrait, hiding Winterhalter’s famous painting of the embellished empress in a balloon dress that we all know. This one-off event wants to challenge the way we represent this historical female character to ourselves.
WienTourismus initiated this action in cooperation with the Sisi Museum, the Möbelmuseum Wien and the Hotel Imperial. In these three places, “Sisi’s New Portrait” was placed in front of the portrait or in front of its ubiquitous replicas in the city.
Because the real woman, the empress and the mother were more and more relegated to the background and she was not just this beauty exploited by the Court. This portrait in the form of text was created by designer and artistic director Vivian Dehning.
Norbert Kettner, director of the Vienna tourist office explains the process as follows: “On International Women’s Day, March 8, and Women’s Month, we are symbolically correcting an outdated and unjust image. Empress Elisabeth is just one woman among many others whose collective memory has been remembered for centuries above all by her appearance. “Sisi’s New Portrait” shows a pioneer whose work has often remained hidden behind the pop-cultural charge of her person.
