Winter Dreams

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"Winter must be cold for those with no warm memories." Or so An Affair to Remember reminds us. And there is certainly a pervasive chill over the Kunsthistorisches Museum at the moment. The Wintermärchen exhibition offers a vast collation of images inspired by the darkest and coldest months of the year. While there's plenty of cheer against the elements, by the 20th century a more dangerous elision of man and his environment has returned.

Winter has its own mythology. The nativity, an old man warming his hands by a fire with a well-stocked table, the feasts, the slaughtered pig. From the clock faces of the medieval period to Joseph Beuys' own invented self-mythology, the season has created its own images and codes. The exhibition is a grand unlocking of those signifiers and, although it is somewhat crammed with examples, the simple chronology invites further investigation.

The work of the Breugel family dominates the early part of the exhibition, not only by their inherent drama, but through the vividness of their depictions. As the medieval period gives way to the excesses of the 16th and 17th century, the harshness of those canvases - not least the brutal slaughter of the innocents - turns to Rubens and his fecund feasts. Here a corpulent bean king stuffs his face.

Perhaps the most ostentatious work on display is the two sleighs from the late 18th and early 19th century. Gilded gliding fantasies with harnesses studded with bells, winter provided just another excuse to show off. And although they cannot compete with Turner's apocalyptic depiction of Hannibal crossing the Alps, David's picture of Napoleon following in his footsteps seems like a polite society portrait next to these golden playthings.

The real chill sets in after such glitzy glamour and Monet's gestural canvases offer more existential frigidity. Rivers burst their banks and water, ice and snow become one, distinguished only by the smallest shift in brush stroke. And there's an aesthetic cool to Carl Moll's picture of his studio on the Theresianumgasse. Placed in the top right-hand corner of the canvas, the studio appears like a fevered imago in a desolate white waste. Just the kind of place that you'd find Joseph Beuys' 'Schlitten'. Like Schubert's Leiermann, Monet, Moll and Beuys appear trapped in their frosty landscapes. And its with that deathly chill that you leave this dizzyingly encyclopaedic Winterreise.