Museo Hermann Nitsch

This guide to the Museo Hermann Nitsch in Naples traces the Austrian artist's Theater of Orgies and Mysteries, a ritual performance project he began imagining as a teenager in 1957 after growing up under bombing raids in wartime Vienna. It describes the performances themselves, crosses, blood and milk, a skinned bull carcass, crushed fruit and entrails, gongs and incense, ending each time in a shared bowl of lentil stew. Vienna's police and courts arrested him repeatedly through the 1960s and 70s, and the actress Brigitte Bardot once called him a barbarian.