Leopold Museum 2025

16.12.2024

Schiele, Biedermeier and “Hidden Modernism"

In the upcoming year, the Leopold Museum will focus on Egon Schiele’s late oeuvre, look at the art of the Biedermeier period from a fresh perspective, explore the fascination of the occult around 1900, and honor Ortner & Ortner’s “Libelle” with its artistic interventions by Eva Schlegel and Brigitte Kowanz. Additionally, the museum will invite visitors to embark on an innovative Virtual Reality Experience with Egon Schiele, extend its Online Collection and present the relaunch of the Egon Schiele Autograph Database. Those in search of relaxation during their visit to the Leopold Museum may as of now head for the new Hoffmann Lounge, an homage to the world-renowned architect and designer Josef Hoffmann.

2024: 440,000 Visitors – International Presence in Korea

Approximately 440,000 people visited the exhibitions at the Leopold Museum in 2024. The presentation at the National Museum of Korea, Vienna 1900. The Dreaming Artists. From Gustav Klimt to Egon Schiele. The Leopold Museum Collection, has opened successfully in Seoul, and promises an influx of 80,000 visitors who wish to see Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka, Gerstl & Co. in December, the first month of the exhibition, alone.

Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka: New Acquisitions in the Amount of 15 Million Euros

The Leopold Museum considers the expansion of the collection one of its core tasks. Director Hans-Peter Wipplinger reports that, as in previous years, 2024 again saw the acquisition of numerous important additions to the collection: “This year, we were able to integrate 315 new artworks into the collection through donations and acquisitions. The value of the donations amounts to around 15 million euros, while several works could be purchased thanks to the support of our Circle of Patrons, Salon Leopold and generous patrons. Among the new objects in the collection are works by artists including Max Beckmann, Marie Egner, Richard Gerstl, Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Moriz Nähr, Max Oppenheimer, Egon Schiele, and many others.

THE EXHIBITIONS

Times of Change. Egon Schiele’s Last Years is the title of the first exhibition set to open in 2025, on 28th March. Featuring around 120 works, it will shed light on the last period of the eminent Austrian Expressionist’s oeuvre. It is the first presentation to focus on the art production during the last five years of the artist’s life, who died in the autumn of 1918, aged only 28, from complications associated with the Spanish Influenza. The exhibition’s emphases will be on Schiele’s quest for his own self, his depictions of couples, his exploration of the likeness of his wife Edith, on landscapes, on works created during his time in the army, on portraits of his friends and on the ubiquitous female figure. The presentation will highlight Schiele’s successes and his artistic breakthrough with his large-scale exhibition at the Vienna Secession, analyze his last, partly unfinished works, and afford insights into hitherto unpublished material, including Edith Schiele’s diary.

The interactive VR experience, produced by Amilux Film, Egon Schiele – A Personal Encounter, was created by the artist Gerda Leopold, who has acted as the virtual adventure’s director and producer, and can be experienced from early April at the Leopold Museum. The work represents not only an homage to Schiele’s artistic oeuvre but also an innovative opportunity to experience the artist up close.

The exhibition Biedermeier. An Era in Flux illuminates one of the most important periods in Austrian art. On display from 10th April, the presentation will focus on art beyond the center of the Habsburg Empire – the residential and capital city Vienna – in the other hubs of the Danube Monarchy, such as Budapest, Prague, Ljubljana, Trieste, Venice and Milan, where social and technological innovations impacted the development of art. While many suffered from extreme poverty in the shadows of the economic upturn, a wealthy bourgeoisie emerged whose confident members wanted to be immortalized in realistic portraits. Along with family portraits and genre scenes, the exhibition features landscape depictions based on the study of nature and light. Commissioned by members of the high aristocracy, artists captured the most beautiful places in the Austrian Monarchy and bordering countries. Hubert Sattler visited the Orient as well as the US, creating large-format vedute of Constantinople, Cairo and New York. The interior design of the time was dominated by a new simplicity, which in the early 20th century would lead to a rediscovery of the Biedermeier by architects including Adolf Loos and Josef Hoffmann.

The downsides of industrialization in the late 19th century resulted in Vienna in an interest in alternative models of society. The exhibition Hidden Modernism. The Fascination with the Occult around 1900, shown from 4th September, will explore the industrial era’s criticism of materialism and of Christian religious practices, which went hand in hand with an enthusiasm for Far Eastern scenarios of salvation. The symptoms of an ethical revolution, as demanded by Friedrich Nietzsche, ranged from a cult of the body and vegetarianism to a dress reform, Expressionist dance and theosophy. The fascination with the work of Richard Wagner penetrated all aspects of cultural life; his notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or universal work of art, pointed the way ahead for the Vienna Secessionists. While Vienna was not a hub of occultism, unlike Paris or Prague, the theosophy espoused by the Russian writer Helena Blavatsky found its way into Vienna’s vegetarian circles. One of the protagonists was the polymath Friedrich Eckstein whose network included the composers Gustav Mahler and Hugo Wolf, the founder of anthroposophy Rudolf Steiner and the Social Democrat politician Victor Adler. The fluid figures depicted by Edvard Munch, the belief in the existence of an Odic force affording vital energy, and the discovery of X-rays, furnished artistic impulses and yielded the introspective images of Richard Gerstl, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka and Max Oppenheimer, who saw the protagonists of their works as auratic apparitions.

The MuseumsQuartier is among the largest cultural complexes in Central Europe. The “MQ Libelle” on the roof of the Leopold Museum, which was inaugurated in 2020, will be the focus of the presentation Libelle+ shown from 10th October. This first architectural addition to the MQ expanded the area’s public space at a height of 20 meters, affording spectacular views of the inner city of Vienna and the splendid buildings along the Ringstraße. The widely visible landmark and contemporary Gesamtkunstwerk, created by the architectural office Ortner & Ortner, has become a popular meeting place and viewpoint. The presentation focuses on the genesis of artistic ideas that led to the “Libelle”’s realization, as well as on the interactions between the “MQ Libelle” and the artistic interventions by Brigitte Kowanz and Eva Schlegel that are intrinsically linked with it.

The permanent presentation Vienna 1900. Birth of Modernism at the Leopold Museum represents a steady highlight affording unique insights into the vibrant atmosphere of Vienna around 1900. The exhibition includes an extensive presentation of works by Gustav Klimt, the world’s largest Egon Schiele collection, the most comprehensive permanent museum presentation in the world dedicated to Oskar Kokoschka, the largest collection of works by Richard Gerstl, as well as exquisite examples of the artisan craftwork produced by the Wiener Werkstätte. The presentation further features eminent permanent loans, including paintings by the Pre-Raphaelites Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones and Simeon Solomon, works by Auguste Rodin, Ferdinand Hodler, Max Klinger, Fernand Khnopff, Henri Le Sidaner and Franz von Stuck, as well as new acquisitions, among them important donations from private collectors of works by Makart, Klimt, Schiele, Oppenheimer, and others. It thus offers an overview of the international networks of the time and the sources of inspiration of artists active in the cultural location that was Vienna around 1900.

The new permanent presentation From Expressionism to New Objectivity follows on chronologically and thematically from the Vienna 1900 exhibition. It showcases Austrian and German art movements from the first third of the 20th century, and places them into a dialogue with each other. The presentation features works of German Expressionism and New Objectivity, as well as select works by Austrian exponents of the two movements. The German Expressionists presented in the exhibition include the artists Marianne von Werefkin, Alexej von Jawlensky, Wassily Kandinsky, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Gabriele Münter, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Pechstein, Erich Heckel and August Macke. Exponents of New Objectivity, meanwhile, operated on the pulse of the (“Golden”) Twenties, and looked at the world from an entirely new perspective – theirs was an unsentimental, sober, concrete and purist view, in short: an objective and realistic approach. In the works shown in the exhibition, the artists George Grosz, Christian Schad, Otto Dix, Grethe Jürgens, Rudolf Schlichter, Carlo Mense, Felix Nussbaum and Karl Hubbuch captured the spirit of the time on canvas. Their Austrian counterparts included Herbert Ploberger, Otto Rudolf Schatz and Franz Sedlacek, who feature in the presentation with eminent works.

Another eminent Austrian exponent of New Objectivity was Rudolf Wacker. The most extensive retrospective exhibition of his work to date, Magic and Abysses of Reality, will be shown until 6th February. Still on display until 9th March is the first exhibition of the archives, made up of some 11,000 objects, of the producer of upholstery and decorative fabrics Backhausen. The exhibition Poetry of the Ornament. The Backhausen Archives affords an overview of the company’s archives by means of an exquisite selection of 250 exhibits. With their innovative products, which made Backhausen the prime address for experimental textile design, the company made significant contributions to the cultural phenomenon of “Vienna 1900”. The eminent designers, architects and artists of Viennese Modernism who furnished designs for the company included Otto Wagner, Joseph Maria Olbrich, Koloman Moser, Josef Hoffmann, Else Unger, Jutta Sika, Otto Prutscher, Dagobert Peche and My Ullman.

PROJECTS

The new Hoffmann Lounge, installed in the area in front of the Leopold Museum’s shop, pays tribute to the world-renowned architect and designer Josef Hoffmann (1870–1956) as an eminent representative of Viennese Modernism. In 1901, Hoffmann entered into a collaboration with the textile manufacturer Backhausen that would last more than four decades. The curtains and carpets in the lounge, conceived in cooperation with BWM Designers & Architects, are based on a Backhausen design which was created in 1909 but never produced. The armchairs and sofas, which hark back to a trend-setting design created by the artist in 1910, are a prime example of his leitmotif, the square. The spherical ceiling lights are based on a design Hoffmann integrated into several of his interiors in different sizes.

The Leopold Museum is continuously working on expanding its ONLINE COLLECTION. Around 2,500 datasets have been made accessible online over the past two years, which have so far been called up by more than 145,000 users from all over the world. According to the Leopold Museum’s Director Hans-Peter Wipplinger “the ONLINE COLLECTION is an essential building block of the museum’s strategy to offer information and research findings beyond physical borders. Along with collecting, researching and conserving, the core tasks of any museum also include the presentation and mediation of art on site and, by extension, also within the digital sphere.” From the beginning of the year 2025, the Leopold Museum will link its database with the online portals of cultural heritage Kulturpool and Europeana, thus strengthening its advertising presence and making an exquisite selection of works from the collection even more widely accessible.

The research platform Egon Schiele Autograph Database (ESDA) features around 2,940 objects, including letters exchanged between Schiele and his family and friends as well as fellow artists, his correspondence with art dealers, exhibition venues and collectors, poems, entries in notebooks and diaries, and much more. The ESDA was compiled from 2008–2010 at the behest of the former Federal Ministry of Education, Arts and Culture (present-day Federal Chancellery, Division II: Arts and Culture). It was conceived by the Leopold Museum Private Foundation, and is subject to continuous maintenance and expansion. The relaunch of the ESDA came after a complete overhaul of the platform’s user interface. The website has been expanded with a detailed exhibition history and an extensive bibliography, which ranges from historical reviews and catalogues to present-day literature.

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