MODERN BIEDERMEIER: THE LEOPOLD MUSEUM PRESENTS AN ERA FULL OF CONTRASTS

14.04.2025

The Leopold Museum Dedicates a Large-Scale Spring Exhibition to the Fascinating Art Movement of the Biedermeier with the Title "Biedermeier. The Rise of an Era".

190 works by more than 70 artists – including paintings, watercolors and drawings, as well as furnishings, glass, porcelain, dresses and archival material – afford insights into the innovative era, which spanned the time from the Congress of Vienna in 1814/15 to the bourgeois revolutions in 1848. After the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Europe was shaped by massive political and social upheaval, which profoundly changed society. Looking beyond the art production in the metropolis Vienna, then the capital and residential city of the Habsburg Empire, the Biedermeier exhibition also focuses on the magnificent centers of the crown lands, including Budapest, Prague, Ljubljana, Venice and Milan. It trains the spotlight on Viennese masters, such as Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, Friedrich von Amerling and Peter Fendi, as well as on eminent artists from the various parts of the Danube Monarchy, among them painters like the Hungarian Miklós Barabás, the Czech Antonín Machek, the Venetian Francesco Hayez and the Slovenian Jožef Tominc.

 

“Between 1855 and 1857, the fictional character ‘Weiland Gottlieb Biedermaier’, created by Adolf Kußmaul and Ludwig Eichrodt, appeared in the satirical weekly magazine Fliegende Blätter – the figure of a poet, in whose name they wrote parodistic poems. This character would give his name to an era, relating primarily to Austria and Germany, which took place between 1815 and 1848, and was one of the most important periods in the development of Austrian art. The exhibition at the Leopold Museum focuses on Austria with the territorial borders of the time, thus offering a much more varied and interesting picture.”

Johann Kräftner, curator of the exhibition

 

The comprehensive presentation features select works from the collection of the Leopold Museum, as well as loans from Austrian and international institutions and private collections.

 

“The topicality of this exhibition – which goes back more than 200 years – resides in the recent emergence and increasing prevalence of the concept of neo-Biedermeier, for instance in philosophy and sociology. Our time evokes similar sentiments prompting a nostalgic withdrawal into the home and a lack of interest in democratic structures as a cultural phenomenon. Today, this is caused by fears of globalization, wars and migration movements, and the loss of one’s personal life in a digital world increasingly controlled and monitored by robotics and the algorithms of artificial intelligence.”

Hans-Peter Wipplinger, Director of the Leopold Museum

 

The exhibition starts with the urban developments in Vienna and the other capitals of the Habsburg Monarchy. Vienna was very limited in terms of expansion owing to the walls around its city center until the city’s de-fortification in 1857, yet a movement of renewal had set in already during the Biedermeier period – existing streets were extended and new ones built, and bourgeois tenement buildings were constructed. Manufactories, hotels, dance halls and public swimming pools, meanwhile, enlivened and modernized the city. In Budapest, squares and streets along the Danube were newly aligned with tenement buildings and splendid palaces of the Hungarian nobility. The metropolises of Northern Italy, too, derived important impulses under the Austrian administration, with the construction of modern theaters, concert halls, museums, coffee houses, schools and factories.

Retreat into the Private Sphere, Urban Society and Rural Idylls

Owing to the strengthening of absolutism and the suppression of democratic aspirations in the wake of the Congress of Vienna, people retreated into the private sphere for fear of reprisals. Themes such as a longing for security and harmony in everyday family life entered the pictorial worlds of Biedermeier artists. Despite widespread severe poverty, the simultaneous economic upturn yielded a confident bourgeoisie, who wanted to be depicted in proud portraits and thus offered insights into the values of this predominantly urban society. As a counter draft, artists also focused on the modest, idyllic life in the countryside. Artists and scientists explored the Austrian Alps as well as far-flung countries and cities, thus satisfying a longing for the new and unknown, and a novel interest in foreign cultures.

Innovations and Industrial Progress

The time was one of great innovations and esthetical changes. Since the invention of the steam engine in 1769 and the foundation of the world’s first industrial cotton spinning factory in England, industrial developments snowballed. The industrial progress became the mainspring of commercial life. Textile factories emerged, the first railway lines were built, and spectacular suspension bridges were constructed, including the one that first connected Buda and Pest.

Biedermeier Landscapes

The painters of the Biedermeier era traveled to the Salzkammergut region and the pre-Alps, where they created realistic renderings of nature. Along with precise drawings and atmospheric engravings and etchings, the new and inexpensive printing technique of lithography enabled artists to reach a wide range of buyers.

Looking Further Afield

During the Biedermeier period, trade flourished once more. Vienna, Budapest and the port city Trieste traded with the Middle East, while luxury goods were imported from Alexandria and Damascus. Lombardy, a center for the production of raw silk, supplied the flourishing Viennese manufactories. Scientific interests took artists to far-flung destinations: Thomas Ender accompanied an expedition, ordered by Emperor Franz I, to Brazil. Hubert Sattler traveled the world and created large-format vedute of Constantinople (now Istanbul), Cairo and New York.

Biedermeier Interiors and Fashion

In the watercolors of Rudolf von Alt and Thomas Ender, interior depictions were particularly important. In these interiors, the walls, adorned with exciting wallpaper patterns, were decorated with engravings, watercolors and oil paintings, often hung in several rows one above the other. Interior design and furnishings were dominated by a new canon of simplicity, which was appreciated both by the bourgeoisie and the nobility, and which led to a rediscovery of the Biedermeier in the early 20th century by architects including Adolf Loos and Josef Hoffmann. Representations in paintings and graphic works, as well as rare examples of original garments, meanwhile, afford wonderful insights into the imaginative Biedermeier fashion.

The Masters of Portrait Art

In portrait painting, the ideal image was increasingly replaced by likenesses that were as realistic as possible – at times resulting in portraits with almost caricature-like traits. In higher social circles, especially, it was very fashionable to capture one’s family in paintings. In such family portraits, for instance the watercolor Gathering of the Austrian Imperial Family in 1834 (1835), the depicted are shown in lively interactions, while the family’s social standing and wealth is reflected in precious textiles and the protagonists’ surroundings.

Scenes from Everyday Life, Family Idylls and Misery

Depictions of everyday scenes from the lives of farmers and craftsmen were highly popular at the time. A master of staging such scenes was Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller. In his painting Restored to New Life (1852), he coupled the heightening and beautification of the everyday with a naturalistic manner of depiction. Beholders encountered an optimistic attitude towards life in such renderings. While the era brought great, often ephemeral wealth to the upper classes, other strata of society lived in abject poverty. Biedermeier artists like Josef Danhauser addressed this divide in socio-critical works, which at times express a bitter irony.

The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue in German and English, with essays by Lili-Vienne Debus, Sabine Grabner, Johann Kräftner, Stefan Kutzenberger, Michaela Lindinger, Fernando Mazzocca, Juliane Mikoletzky, Adrienn Prágai and Radim Vondráček, as well as a prologue by Hans-Peter Wipplinger.

 

Link to the exhibition page

Link to detailed press material and printable images

Link to the photo gallery of the exhibition opening

 

Opening Ceremony

The opening ceremony hosted by the Leopold Museum’s Director Hans-Peter Wipplinger – in the presence of the Leopold Museum board members Sonja Hammerschmid and Saskia Leopold as well as the museum’s Managing Director Moritz Stipsicz – was attended by around 650 guests, among them the ambassadors Edit Szilágyiné Bátorfi (Hungary), Vito Cecere (Germany), Aleksander Geržina (Slovenia), Jiří Šitler (Czech Republic), the team of curators Johann Kräftner and Lili-Vienne Debus, the catalogue authors Sabine Grabner, Stefan Kutzenberger, Michaela Lindinger, Juliane Mikoletzky and Radim Vondráček, lenders Ernst Czerny, Wolfgang and Gabriele Liechtenstein as well as Johannes and Franz Meran, the collector Waltraud Leopold, Agnes Husslein-Arco (director of the Heidi Horten Collection), Robert Lasshofer (chairman of the Wiener Städtische Versicherungsverein), im Kinsky partner Michael Kovacek, René Schober (Graphic Collection of the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts), Dorotheum expert Marianne Hussl-Hörmann, gallery owners Alexander and Herbert Giese, Julius Hummel, Hansjörg Krug, Peter Zimpel, Christian Huemer (Belvedere Research Center), curator Katharina Lovecky (Belvedere), entrepreneur Maria Rauch-Kallat, Eva Maria Schmertzing-Thonet, Jakob Jelinek and Jürgen Pölzl (Salon Leopold committee), Christoph Thun-Hohenstein, Jin Hong Rim (Korean Culture Center), and many others.

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