LEOPOLD MUSEUM: 2020 BRINGS HUNDERTWASSER, SCHIELE AND MASTERPIECES FROM MONET TO VAN GOGH

13.01.2020

Review 2019: Great success with Vienna 1900 and Expressionism

During the Leopold Museum’s annual press conference, the museum’s Director Hans-Peter Wipplinger presented the impressive balance for the year 2019. With 420,000 visitors expected by the end of the year, 2019 will be the second most successful year in the museum’s history.

Following on directly from the highly successful anniversary year of Viennese Modernism in 2018 – with exhibitions on Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Madame d’Ora, as well as the first ever presentation of the Heidi Horten Collection – Hans-Peter Wipplinger set new standards in 2019 with the permanent presentation Vienna 1900. Birth of Modernism. The most comprehensive presentation of Viennese fin-de-siècle art shown to date, spanning three floors and featuring more than 1,300 objects from the fields of painting, graphic art and applied arts, affords singular insights into the enormous wealth and diversity of this era’s artistic and intellectual achievements. The catalogue accompanying the exhibition, a veritable magnum opus comprising 560 pages and 1,300 illustrations, is available as of now.

In 2019, the Leopold Museum further showed comprehensive retrospectives on Oskar Kokoschka, Olga Wisinger-Florian and Edmund Kalb. The second half of the year has been dedicated to Expressionism, with two presentations being currently shown that illustrate this radical art movement in all its diversity: the exhibition on Richard Gerstl, whose works enter into a dialogue with international exponents of Classical Modernism and contemporary art, and the presentation German Expressionism, showcasing a cross-section of the Braglia and Johenning Collections.

New exhibitions in 2020

Hundertwasser – Schiele

The Leopold Museum kicks off the exhibition year 2020 with a cooperation with the Hundertwasser Non-Profit Foundation, for the first time juxtaposing the oeuvre of Friedensreich Hundertwasser with select works by the Expressionist Egon Schiele, whom Hundertwasser revered. 20 years after Hundertwasser’s death, the Leopold Museum now dedicates an exhibition, comprising some 170 works and conceived as a dialogue, to these two iconic artists. In Paris, Hundertwasser propagated Schiele’s art among his fellow artists, and in 1965 titled one of his paintings Mourning Egon Schiele. Until his death, Hundertwasser surrounded himself with reproductions of the artist he so looked up to in his living spaces and studios in Venice and New Zealand. In the context of this exhibition, the artist, art theorist and Hundertwasser companion Bazon Brock will continue and restage Hundertwasser’s infinite “Hamburg Line”, originally created during a performative painting action in 1959, together with students from the University of Applied Arts Vienna at the Leopold Museum.

Universally talented artist Pirchan

The Leopold Museum dedicates a comprehensive exhibition to Emil Pirchan, who was a pioneer of Expressionist stage design, an imaginative poster designer and successful exponent of advertising art. Also working as a costumer, designer, book illustrator, author and teacher, the artist was active in Berlin, Prague and Vienna. Around 1930 he created a futuristic, seemingly mechanical design for a theater building in South America. The tiered stage – a milestone in modern stage design known as “Jessner staircase” – would have been unthinkable without Pirchan’s involvement. Pirchan’s estate only came back to light a few years ago, when it was recovered from an attic. Following an exhibition at the Museum Folkwang in Essen, the Leopold Museum is the first Austrian institution to showcase this universally talented and exceptional artist.

Inspiration Beethoven

Marking the 250th birthday of the musical genius Ludwig van Beethoven, the Leopold Museum is showing the exhibition Inspiration Beethoven. A Symphony in Pictures from Vienna 1900. Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6, known as the Pastoral Symphony, inspired the Viennese Jugendstil artist and Klimt colleague Josef Maria Auchentaller to create a monumental pictorial program in 1889/99 to adorn the music room at the villa of his father-in-law, the silver jewelry manufacturer Georg Adam Scheid. The ensemble represents the first artistic-pictorial realization of all movements of a Beethoven symphony. The cycle is reconstructed for the first time in Austria, and the history of this Gesamtkunstwerk highlighted through a focus exhibition. A multi-faceted dialogue with works by Gustav Klimt, Carl Moll, Alfred Roller, and others, shows how Beethoven became a source of inspiration and a point of reference to exponents of Viennese Modernism fighting for renewal and recognition in fin-de-siècle visual arts.

Monet, van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin

In the autumn of 2020, the Leopold Museum will present the collection of Emil Bührle for the first in Vienna. The German-born industrialist based in Switzerland compiled a highly important art collection especially during the 1950s. The exhibition focuses on his collection of French Impressionism, with eminent works by Manet, Degas, Renoir, Monet, van Gogh and Cézanne. A successful entrepreneur and proprietor of the machine tool factory Oerlikon, Bührle was accused of exporting weapons at the end of World War II, seeing as he had delivered guns to Germany at the behest of the Swiss government. When it was ascertained that his collection included 13 looted artworks from France, Bührle restituted all of them and in some instances bought them back. After the collector’s death, his family established a foundation in 1960, which made parts of the collection accessible to the public in Zurich. In late 2021, the newly built annex to the Kunsthaus Zürich will become the new home to this part of the collection. The exhibition at the Leopold Museum features some 100 works from the Emil Bührle Collection, including masterpieces by Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh and Claude Monet.

The Body Electric

The exhibition The Body Electric. Erwin Osen – Egon Schiele is based on a group of recently re-discovered drawings by Erwin Osen. These were commissioned by Stefan Jellinek, a doctor active in Vienna until 1939, who during World War I researched the use of electricity in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorders. The hitherto unknown drawings by Osen, who was a companion and model of Egon Schiele and a co-signatory of the manifesto of Schiele’s Neukunstgruppe, broaden and enrich our understanding of Viennese Modernism and its art practice, which was closely linked with the culture of clinical medicine. In Vienna around 1900, artists were increasingly interested in the body as the field of manifestation of questions surrounding identity and the individual: rather than in the body in its ideal and idealized form, they wanted to show bodies in all their diversity and shortcomings. The Body Electric places the work of the hardly known but highly mythologized artist Osen into the context of Jellinek’s electropathological research and links it with Schiele’s interest in depicting patients.

Josef Pillhofer

Marking the tenth anniversary of the artist’s death in 2020 as well as his 100th birthday in 2021, the Leopold Museum is dedicating a comprehensive retrospective to Josef Pillhofer, one of the most eminent sculptors and draftsmen in Austria. The Wotruba student influenced by Herbert Boeckl received a state scholarship in 1950 and moved to Paris, where he studied under Ossip Zadkine at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and worked in his professor’s studio. His exploration of the Cubist sculptures of Jacques Lipchitz, Alexander Archipenko and Henri Laurens, among others, impacted on his form language. In Paris, he met further eminent sculptors, including Constantin Brâncuși, Germaine Richier and Alberto Giacometti. On the importance of his time in Paris, Pillhofer said: “To me, the human relatedness with its natural appearance in the medium of sculpture doesn’t, and never did, contradict a convincing, contemporary objective. This is still true in the second half of the 20th century, albeit with an open perception and taking into account the experiences of Modernism.” In this quote, Pillhofer referred to the “Classicism of Modernism” in the sculptures of Aristide Maillol, Henri Matisse and the German sculptor Wilhelm Lehmbruck.

ImPulsTanz 2020 at the Leopold Museum

In the summer of 2020, ImPulsTanz – Vienna International Dance Festival (9th July to 9th Aug.) will be hosted by the Leopold Museum for the fourth year running. The Graphic Cabinet will show a solo exhibition of the South Korean performance artist, dancer and choreographer Jeong Geumhyung, while the auditorium will show films, and both atriums will become venues of dance and live art at the museum. The Leopold Museum provides an unconventional platform, a perfect setting and a diverse context to this festival showcasing contemporary dance and introducing remarkable artists.

MQ Libelle at the rooftop of the Leopold Museum

In April 2020 the architecture of the Leopold Museum will be extended in a vertical direction. With the opening of MQ Libelle on the rooftop of the Leopold Museum (opening week: 21st to 26th April 2020), the MuseumsQuartier in Vienna receives a new attraction. The terrace, affording one of the most stunning views of Vienna’s city center, will be accessible to everyone free of charge. The project is accompanied by leading Austrian artists: The glass facade of the MQ Libelle, called Facade, untitled, veiled, was designed by Eva Schlegel who is famous for her participation in the Venice Biennale (1995) as well as her curatorship of the Austrian contribution to the Biennale (2011). Another eye catcher is the light installation Light Rings by Brigitte Kowanz, who in 2009 received the Grand Austrian State Prize for Fine Arts, among other awards, for her work with light and space. The multi-functional venue, designed by MQ architect Laurids Ortner, will be rented out as an event location.

The 2020 exhibitions

Vienna 1900. Birth of Modernism, since 16th March 2019
Richard Gerstl. Inspiration – Legacy, 27th Sept. 2019–20th Jan. 2020
German Expressionism. The Braglia and Johenning Collections, 15th Nov. 2019–20th April 2020
Hundertwasser – Schiele. Imagine Tomorrow, 20th Feb.–31st Aug. 2020
Emil Pirchan. A Universally Talented Artist, 30th May–21st Sept. 2020
Inspiration Beethoven. A Symphony in Pictures from Vienna 1900, 30th May–21st Sept. 2020
The Body Electric. Erwin Osen – Egon Schiele, 27th Aug. 2020–14th Feb. 2021
Monet, van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin. The Emil Bührle Collection, 2nd Oct. 2020–28th June 2021
Josef Pillhofer. Retrospective, 20th Nov. 2020–15th March 2021

Detailed Press Material

Queries & contact:
Leopold Museum Private Foundation
Mag. Klaus Pokorny and Veronika Werkner, BA
Press/Public Relations
0043 1 525 70 - 1507 and 1541
presse@leopoldmuseum.org
www.leopoldmuseum.org

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