Above: Leopold Museum 2020 © Leopold Museum, Vienna 2020 Photo: Ouriel Morgensztern
There is no shortage of museums in Vienna. Many of them demand attention for their architecture alone – the Kunsthistoriches being the prime example – but the Leopold Museum has an understated presence, in a quiet pedestrian square inside the city’s designated museum quarter, just across the road from its gloriously showy neighbour. Even the name is ambiguous, until you know that the building houses the collection of Rudolf and Elisabeth Leopold, two ophthalmologists who shared a passion for art, and that Rudolf himself was the first director. The specially commissioned building opened in 2001, a sleek, modernist cube which nods to Joseph Olbrich’s 1898 design for the Secession Building (itself worth a visit). You may well turn up lured by the Leopold’s boast of the world’s largest collection of Egon Schiele’s work, but this only tells part of the story. The permanent exhibitions ‘Vienna 1900 -The Birth of Modernism’ take Austrian art from the late nineteenth century, through Secessionism, to the Inter-war years.
This story unfolds over three floors which work chronologically down from the top. The interior is designed around a central, full-height covered atrium, which gives a sense of space, with the exhibitions following a circular route on each level. You start and end at the stairs. Simple and effective. The top floor sets the scene with the 1870s artistic status quo. All the displays have dual language labelling and large introductory boards, and they also make excellent use of blown-up contemporary photographs. There are also audio guides available and good wi-fi if you like looking things up. Here, however, you need nothing more than a clever hang: Hans Makart’s large scale, florid classicism, all gold and flesh, is suspended in front of heavy velvet red drapes. From this surfeit of excess, you pass slowly into the light, through portraits and green-backed landscapes. By the time you are introduced to the founder members of the Vienna Secession – the group who broke away from the official Academy and its style – you know exactly what they are rebelling against. And when you see their minimal, pure lines, their Japanese influenced furniture and the stylized, flattened forms of their posters, the works seem as modern and radical as they must have appeared in 1890s Austria.
The top floor is dominated by Gustav Klimt. There is a mock-up of his studio and even his painting smock, and you can follow the development of his career from an early portrait of his sister, through the soft-toned almost Whistlerian works, to the square landscapes and, probably the highlight, Death and Life. (Of course, the Kiss is not here, but if you are interested in Klimt more generally this is a fine selection and much less crowded than the Upper Belvedere). The often familiar Klimts are interspersed the less well-known, or completely new names: paintings and sculpture by the likes of Broncia Koller-Pinell and Carl Moll. Take time, too, to look out over the roof tops of Vienna through two big picture windows which emphasise the airiness of the galleries, and then immerse yourself in a room of glassware and pottery, beautifully displayed with jewel-like brilliance in illuminated niches on darkened walls.
Down a level, there is a similar balance of art and design, where Schiele takes centre-stage and the narrative moves on towards the First World War. All the familiar self-portraits are here, angular and angsty, but there is a lot more to Schiele’s work than shock value nudity. Close up his paint is thrilling: a patchwork of richly-applied colours which makes flesh decay and inanimate objects burst into life. If you are a fan, this is pretty much Schiele heaven; if you need to be convinced, you probably will be. There are other big names but they failed to hold my attention: Oskar Kokoschka’s canvases seem scratchy and messy in comparison. Again, however, with cleverly curated juxtapositions, it’s the lesser names and especially sculpture which gets showcased. George Minne’s attenuated figures have the emotional clout of Auguste Rodin, and work brilliantly against the Schiele paintings.
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You can take a breather on the second floor which houses the shop and restaurant – a slightly odd mix of Asian cuisine which is very much not your usual museum café. The hiatus is slightly frustrating and means the ground floor displays feel almost like an afterthought. I suspect some people might miss them out entirely. But they take the story and run with it, broadening out the focus on Vienna to Germanic art more generally and showing the impact of the First World War and the political and social changes in its aftermath. The mood here is entirely different, slightly claustrophobic, with dark blue walls and little natural light, and a sparser, more traditional hang. The works are a Who’s Who of German Expressionism including lots of examples by women artists like Gabriele Münter and Marianne von Werefkin who used to be sidelined in favour of their male counterparts. You follow the slide from nature-based optimism, to disillusion and despair, culminating in the New Objectivity artists’ cynical and quite frankly often disturbing oddness. At this point you really could do with a coffee and a Sacher torte.
The Leopold Museum has a specific focus which will not be for everyone. However, it presents its art with context enough to also tell the social history of early 20th century Austria, and Secessionism is as important to Vienna as the city’s imperial past (take a metro trip to Karlsplatz for instance). It is a TARDIS of a museum: it looks small on the outside yet you can easily spend several hours in there. In addition to the permanent collection, it runs temporary exhibitions, currently including a focus on the creepy precision of Rudolph Wacker. Finally, it is a bit of a palette cleanser – quieter and calmer, in every sense, compared with crowds and the ornate architectural excess of Vienna’s other museums.
The Leopold is open every day except Tuesday, 10am – 6pm.
It’s a short walk from Volkstheater metro station and various tram stops, right in the heart of a city which is very pedestrian friendly (although with a surprising absence of signage).
Like all Viennese museums they discourage all but the smallest bags, but there is a cloakroom and plenty of lockers (1E coin deposit, or a plastic token given out by staff).
Standard entry is 17E, you can book online but there is no need and no benefit to doing so. In fact, if you pay on the day, you can take advantage of a joint entry ticket to the Leopold and the Kunsthistoriches (32E, saving yourself 6E).
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Catriona Miller is an independent art historian and writer on art based in the UK. She has taught and lectured on all aspects of art history and is currently researching women artists in British collections and issues of nationalism and identity in nineteenth-century landscape painting.
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