Leopold Museum
The Leopold Collection is one of the most important collections of modern Austrian art in the world. The more than 5,000 exhibits were collected by Rudolf and his wife Elisabeth Leopold over a period of five decades. In 1994, the Collection was consolidated by Rudolf Leopold with the assistance of the Republic of Austria and the Austrian National Bank into the Leopold Museum Private Foundation - a non-profit private foundation. The Leopold Museum is a unique and active museum awash with light in the heart of Vienna and the biggest cultural magnet in the MuseumsQuartier. Besides exciting special exhibitions, it not only houses the most substantial and most important collection of Egon Schiele worldwide but also masterpieces by Gustav Klimt beyond price, like his probably most important figurative painting “Death and Life”. In no other museum in Vienna one can get so close to the fabled “Fin de siècle Vienna” and witness the birth of Modernity. The collection shows how the art of the Habsburg Empire changed from strict Historicism and lovely Mood Impressionism within a few years to the worldwide unique “Wiener Moderne” which encompasses Klimt and Schiele as well as Oskar Kokoschka, Richard Gerstl, Koloman Moser and many other artists who are all well represented with major works at the Leopold Museum. A further focus of the museum is on the Austrian interwar period, which brought out many important artists like Albin Egger-Lienz, Anton Kolig and Herbert Boeckl and partly points already in the direction of the second half of the twentieth century. This is why Austrian artists of the post war generation or exceptional works of the nineteenth century by Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, Friedrich Gauermann, August von Pettenkofen, Anton Romako, Emil Jakob Schindler, Carl Schuch and others are repeatedly presented. Substantial and amazingly modernly designed everyday objects of the Fin de Siècle round up the collection, whereby especially Otto Wagner, Adolf Loos, Dagobert Peche and the founders of the Wiener Werkstätte Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser have to be cited. And since all the great artists of the Wiener Moderne met on a regular basis in the epochal coffee houses for inspiring exchanges, it goes without saying that also at the Leopold Museum a coffee house must have its place. At the “Café Leopold” you can relax and review your visit of the Leopold collection which was brought together over the course of five decades by Rudolf Leopold and his wife Elisabeth and now comprises over 5,000 art objects.
Admission Included