Leopold Museum: Most successful year in the history of the museum with more than half a million visitors

11.12.2018

2019: Multi-layered permanent presentation “Vienna around 1900” and Expressionism emphasis

During their annual press conference, the Directors of the Leopold Museum Hans-Peter Wipplinger and Gabriele Langer were able to give an impressive summery of the past year. Director Wipplinger presented his multi-layered exhibition program for 2019 together with his team of curators.

Records and growth

During the most successful year in its history, the Leopold Museum broke all records: the highly successful trend in attendance figures of previous years increased once more by almost 37 % (2017: 8 %) during the period of January to November 2018 (2017: 380.000). By the end of the year, the number of visitors is expected to exceed the half-million mark for the first time, with the percentage of Austrian visitors growing to 31 % (2017: 13 %) and that of international guests to 69 %. The percentage of income generated by the Leopold Museum autonomously of 60 % (2017: 56 %) of all revenues represents another outstanding figure.

Multi-faceted exhibitions, cooperations and sponsoring activities

Among the museum’s success factors are its multi-faceted exhibition program, which in 2018 included 13 presentations, focusing on the thematic emphasis of Viennese Modernism and its protagonists as well as on the first ever presentation, curated by Agnes Husslein-Arco, of the private collection of Heidi Goëss-Horten, who also generously supported the exhibition. Another are the museum’s cooperations, first and foremost with Wien Tourismus. Increased activities in the area of art sponsoring, for which the museum recently received a Maecenas award, brought another 1 million euros revenue. Any additional income was re-invested in refurbishment to ensure the upkeep and improvement of the infrastructure and to optimize the visitors’ experience, as well in acquisitions for the museum’s collection and in art education programs.

Vienna around 1900, Kokoschka, Gerstl

Following this year’s thematic emphasis on Viennese Modernism with comprehensive exhibitions on Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt, the Leopold Museum’s 2019 presentations are devoted to further protagonists of the Austrian avant-garde at the beginning of the 20th century and focus on artistic and intellectual life in Vienna around 1900. The opening of the museum’s most comprehensive “Vienna 1900” presentation to date at the beginning of the year will be followed by extensive exhibitions on Oskar Kokoschka and Richard Gerstl.

The exhibition year 2019 starts with the presentation “Vienna around 1900. Source of Modernism” which will shed light on the artistic and intellectual achievements of an era shaped by upheaval and the clash of tradition and Modernism. The exhibition focuses not only on the arts – including the visual arts, literature, theater, music and architecture – but also on other spheres of knowledge, such as philosophy, psychology and economics. Another emphasis is on the structural changes in society at the time and on themes including the crisis of the bourgeoisie, the changes in the concept of subject and the liberation of physicality. Further explored will be historical and socio-political implications within the melting pot of the Danube Monarchy, such as the 1873 stock market crash, the divide between the rich and the poor, between rigid conservatism and innovative movements as well as between anti-Semitism and Zionism.

Director Hans-Peter Wipplinger invited an advisory panel of experts to support this research project, which saw the museum’s team of curators discuss the different tendencies of this pluralistic era with the experts during numerous symposia.

The exhibition’s journey back in time starts with Historicism around 1870, highlights Realist and Atmospheric Impressionist tendencies, then illustrates the radical paradigm shift which set in with the founding of the Secession and gives a comprehensive overview of the splendid achievements of Viennese Jugendstil and of the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or universal work of art (not least through Wiener Werkstätte products). It goes on to addresses the pre-eminent “explorers of the soul” of Austrian Expressionism, and concludes with a focus on the multi-faceted artistic formations situated between an abstracting-Expressionist style and positions of New Objectivity up to 1930.

The permanent presentation, which is intended to be shown for about five years over three exhibition levels, will feature approx. 500 exhibits, 70 % of which are sourced from the museum’s own collection. It will also be extensively supported by external, private as well as institutional collections, whose works will brilliantly complement the presentation as permanent loans. Among the lenders are the Wien Museum, the collections of the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, the collection of the University of Applied Arts Vienna, the Austrian National Bank, the Eisenberger, Ploil, Klewan, Grubman, Muzikant and Hummel Collections as well as the Leopold Private Collection.

Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980), one of the most eminent artists of the 20th century, will be acknowledged by the Leopold Museum in cooperation with the Kunsthaus Zürich with the retrospective exhibition “Oskar Kokoschka. Expressionist, Migrant, European” shown from 6th April. The presentation curated by Heike Eipeldauer is the first comprehensive exhibition on this “enfant terrible” (Ludwig Hevesi) and radical innovator for many decades. Some 250 exhibits, including important loans from international museums and private collections, illustrate this exceptional artist’s diverse oeuvre. His painterly and graphic works are deliberately given equal emphasis, while Kokoschka is presented in his activities as a painter, draftsman, graphic artist, writer, dramatist, theater maker, teacher, and as a humanitarian, pacifist and rather ambivalent “homo politicus”.

With its exhibition on Edmund Kalb (1900-1952), the Leopold Museum showcases an artist whose work, dominated by more than one thousand self-portraits, has remained largely unknown to the public. The exhibition’s curator Rudolf Sagmeister presents the Dornbirn-born artist who worked on his series as a “conceptual artist” in an uncompromising and unsparing manner. Using his own face, Kalb sounded out various means of graphic representation. While he did not sell any of his works during his lifetime, he documented his oeuvre in photographs and corresponded with fellow artists around the world. From 1930 his thinking was dominated by mathematics, mechanics, perceptual psychology, nuclear physics, space technology and plant breeding – fields that had impacted on his self-portraits even earlier. His skepticism of authority led to arrests during the Nazi era, but also after the War. The artistic re-discovery of the lateral thinker Kalb at the Leopold Museum features around 100 works.

The Leopold Museum’s presentation on Olga Wisinger-Florian (1844–1926), curated by Marianne Hussl-Hörmann with support from Alexander Giese, is the first comprehensive solo exhibition of one of the most important Austrian artists at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. A fellow artist of Emil Jakob-Schindler and Tina Blau, her oeuvre forms part of the avant-garde of landscape painting from the 1880s onwards. Along with landscapes and interiors, the artist primarily explored the motif of flowers. Using sharp perspectives and distant horizons, Wisinger-Florian experimented with new experiences of space and vision. Parallels to photography can be identified in her affinity for close-up shots, the precise details of which she blurred especially in her late oeuvre in favor of a ground-breaking color Expressionism.

The work of the early Expressionist Richard Gerstl (1883–1908), whose life and oeuvre is intimately connected to the composer Arnold Schönberg, is presented in an exhibition shown in the autumn of 2019. His close contact with the circle of musicians surrounding Schönberg played a central role in Gerstl’s life. The young artist exhibited an extraordinary interest in philosophy, psychology, music and literature. His friendship with Schönberg came to an abrupt end in the summer of 1908, when his love affair with the composer’s wife Mathilde Schönberg was discovered. The ensuing social isolation led to loneliness and depression, and culminated in the artist’s suicide in 1908. During his lifetime, Gerstl had refused to show his works to the public. His oeuvre was first presented publicly in 1931 by the gallery owner and art historian Otto Kallir-Nirenstein. Thanks to Rudolf Leopold, the Leopold Museum is in possession of 16 paintings by Gerstl, making it the largest collection of the artist’s works. Following solo exhibitions in Frankfurt and New York, the works by this exceptional artist will return to Vienna for this presentation curated by Diethard Leopold and Hans-Peter Wipplinger, which is the first monographic exhibition of Gerstl’s oeuvre in around 25 years. Exploring Gerstl’s connection to his contemporaries, role models as well as to artists of the present for the first time in an in-depth manner, the exhibition’s contextualizing approach links the past with the present.

Following the successful presentation of the Heidi Horten Collection, the museum continues its presentations of private collections in the autumn. The exhibition “German Expressionism. The Braglia and Johenning Collections” shows select works from the Swiss private collection of the Fondazione Gabriele e Anna Braglia (Lugano) and the German foundation Renate and Friedrich Johenning. The presentation curated by Ivan Ristić comprises some 130 exhibits and features a selection of eminent works by Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Wassily Kandinsky, Alexej von Jawlensky, Marianne von Werefkin, August Macke, Franz Marc, Paula Modersohn-Becker etc. The presentation includes works by the young rebels from the Dresden artists’ association “Die Brücke”, who revolted against industrialized society and its conventions and aspired to a nature-oriented life reform, as well as creations by the exponents of the group “Der Blaue Reiter”, whose representatives searched for a new inwardness in art. The Expressionists questioned and extended the traditional concept of beauty, and placed a special emphasis on color. To this day, their works have lost none of their suggestive effect.

The Leopold Museum’s cooperation with Karl Regensburger, the artistic director of the dance festival ImPulsTanz, and his team will continue in 2019. In the summer of 2019, the museum will open up an entire floor to ImPulsTanz – Vienna International Dance Festival. The cooperation expedites the transdisciplinary interactions between dramatic-performative and visual forms of art. The festival will host an inspiring mix of artists such as the Canadian Benoît Lachambre and Xavier Le Roy, who can build on their site-specific experiences at the museum, as well as artists who have not yet performed at the Leopold Museum. After his solo performance Lifeguard, which is part of a trilogy, Lachambre will return to the museum to present the project’s second installment, the group work Fluid Grounds.

The Leopold Museum is currently showing the presentation “Egon Schiele. The Jubilee Show” in a reloaded version featuring contemporary artistic positions by Louise Bourgeois via Jürgen Klauke to Sarah Lucas (until 10th March 2019). Also on display once more is the fashion/photography installation “A Viennese Wardrobe” by Arthur Arbesser and Elfie Semotan.

The presentation curated by Ivan Ristić “Into the Great Outdoors. From Waldmüller to Schindler”, which affords insights into the Leopold Museum’s works on the theme of plein-air painting and features exhibits by Friedrich Gauermann, Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, Emil Jakob Schindler, Tina Blau, Theodor Hörmann, Anton Romako and August von Pettenkofen, opened on 6th December. The same event also marked the opening of the presentation “Hidden Treasures II. Artworks Seek Sponsors” compiled by Heike Eipeldauer. This exhibition continues the project initiated by Leopold Museum Director Hans-Peter Wipplinger three years ago which shines the spotlight on works from the collection of the Leopold Museum that have not been displayed for a long time due to their precarious state of preservation. The presentation affords exciting insights into the restoration processes used on paintings, works on paper, arts-and-crafts objects and items of furniture, showing works that have either already found or are still looking for restoration sponsors.

Exhibition openings: “Into the Great Outdoors” and “Hidden Treasures”
Following its one-month closure, the Leopold Museum was visited by more than 1,500 visitors on the first day of re-opening. Several hundred further guests attended the openings of the exhibitions “Into the Great Outdoors” and “Hidden Treasures”. Hans-Peter Wipplinger welcomed visitors including the artists Elke Krystufek, Julia Avramidis and Walter Vopava, the president of the Secession Herwig Kempinger, the artistic director of ImPulsTanz Karl Regensburger, the collectors Diethard and Waltraud Leopold, Philipp Otto Breicha, the gallery owner Susanne Bauer (Bel Etage), the architect Markus Spiegelfeld, the publishers Christian and Nikolaus Brandstätter, Silvia Eisenburger (Society of the Friends of Fine Arts Vienna) and Belvedere curator Franz Smola. Also in attendance were art restorer Manfred Siems, Hans Raumauf (Vienna Insurance Group, president of the Association of Friends of the Leopold Museum), Leopold Birstinger, Felizitas Schreier (Association of Friends of the Leopold Museum), and many others.

Detailed press materials:

Photo gallery: Impressions from the openings of the exhibitions "Into the Great Outdoors" and "Hidden Treasures II”

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