Klimt works from the Leopold Museum featured in virtual Google Klimt retrospective

08.10.2021

Google Arts & Culture dedicates online exhibition to Gustav Klimt

(Vienna / OTS) – With the large-scale virtual retrospective exhibition dedicated to Gustav Klimt, Klimt vs. Klimt – The Man of Contradictions, Google Arts & Culture honors a central protagonist of Viennese Modernism. The online presentation is curated by Belvedere curator Franz Smola, who worked for several years for the Leopold Museum, where he co-curated the exhibition on the artist’s 150th birthday Klimt – Up Close and Personal, among many others.

Featuring works from the collection and eminent permanent loans, the Leopold Museum shows one of the most comprehensive permanent Klimt presentations, ranging from early works, including the recently gifted oil study The Altar of Dionysus, via his Attersee landscapes, all the way to Klimt’s famous allegory Death and Life. The presentation also comprises a reproduction of the anteroom, designed by Josef Hoffmann, of Klimt’s studio, and explores the controversial history of the scandal surrounding Klimt’s Faculty Paintings. The Leopold Museum’s collection further includes 100 Klimt drawings.

“Whether as preparation for a museum visit, for study purposes or as a means of recalling exceptional moments experienced at the museum, the high-quality images of paintings that are accessible via Google Arts & Culture, and now also via the new virtual exhibition, provide a valuable source of inspiration. The Klimt stories, surrounding individual objects and themes, told in the exhibition bring one of the world’s most famous artists to screens all over the globe and illustrate the many facets to the life and oeuvre of this painter and co-founder of the Vienna Secession.” Hans-Peter Wipplinger, Director of the Leopold Museum

Visited by around 500,000 people a year, the Leopold Museum in Vienna is among the most-frequented museums in Austria. Museum-goers from Vienna as well as tourists from Austria and all over the world visit the permanent presentation Vienna 1900. Birth of Modernism for a taste of the unique atmosphere of the fin-de-siècle. Through masterpieces by Gustav Klimt, his protégés Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele – the Leopold Museum houses the world’s largest Schiele collection – and their contemporaries, the wealth of artistic achievements in Vienna around 1900 can be experienced first-hand. The Director of the Leopold Museum emphasizes that “the highly personal emotions triggered when looking at the artworks on site make a museum visit an exciting, unparalleled and irreplaceable experience”. However, “Google’s online museum, which can be visited 24 hours a day, affords free, high-quality digital access to Klimt’s art from all corners of the planet with an internet connection. The Leopold Museum is currently working hard to also provide a comprehensive presentation of its collection online”, adds Wipplinger.

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