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out, who asked me about Gainsborough; I was able to oblige him and tell him where to find Gainsborough. In the end his group had already left the museum when he approached me and asked me about the Hotel Wandl, where his group was accommodated. He had spent half an hour in front of the Landscape in Suffolk without giving his group a moment's thought, this was the first time he had been in central Europe and the first time he had seen an original Gainsborough. That Gainsborough was the high spot of his trip, he said, in surprisingly good German, before turning and leaving the museum. I had offered to help him find the Hotel Wandl but he had declined. A young painter, of about thirty, travels with a group to Vienna and looks at the Landscape in Suffolk and says that seeing the Landscape in Suffolk has been the high spot of his trip. This fact made me reflective the whole ensuing afternoon and well into the evening. How does that man paint in Tbilisi?, I had asked myself all that time before eventually dismissing the thought as nonsensical. Lately there have been more Italians than Frenchmen, more Englishmen than Americans visiting the Kunsthistorisches Museum. The Italians with their innate understanding of art always act as if they were initiated from birth. The French tend to walk through the museum rather bored, the English act as if they knew and had seen everything. The Russians are full of admiration. The Poles regard everything with arrogance. The Germans at the Kunsthistorisches Museum look at their catalogue all the time while they go through the rooms, and scarcely at the originals hanging on the walls, they follow the catalogue and, as they walk through the museum, crawl deeper and deeper into the catalogue until, having reached the last page of the catalogue, they have therefore reached the exit from the museum. Austrians, especially Viennese, rarely go to the Kunsthistorisches Museum if one disregards the thousands of school classes which pay their duty visit to the Kunsthistorisches Museum every year. The school classes are guided through the museum by their teachers, men or women, which has a devastating effect on the pupils because, during these visits to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the teachers by their schoolmasterly narrow-mindedness stifle any perceptivity which these pupils may have for paintings and the men who created them. Dull-witted as they generally are, they very quickly kill in the pupils in their charge any feeling not only for painting, and the visit to the museum through which they lead their, so to speak, innocent victims as a rule, by their dull-wittedness and consequential dull-witted garrulousness, thus becomes the last visit to a museum by any of these individual pupils. Having once visited the Kunsthistorisches Museum with their teachers, these pupils never enter it again as long as they live. The first visit of all these young people is simultaneously their last. On these visits the teachers destroy for good the interest in art of the pupils in their charge, that is a fact. The teachers ruin the pupils, that is the truth, that is a century-old fact, and Austrian teachers in particular ruin in their pupils any taste for art from the start; at first all young people are receptive to everything, hence also to art, but the teachers thoroughly drive the art out of them; the predominantly dull-witted heads of Austrian teachers to this day proceed ruthlessly against their pupils' longing for art and generally for anything artistic by which all young people are initially fascinated and delighted in the most natural way. The teachers, however, are through and through petit-bourgeois and instinctively act against their pupils' fascination by art and enthusiasm for art by reducing art and generally anything artistic to their own depressing stupid dilettantism and by turning art and generally anything artistic at school into their repulsive recorder playing and an equally repulsive and incompetent