LEOPOLD MUSEUM 2023: WÜRTH COLLECTION, EXPRESSIONISM EMPHASIS AND NEW ONLINE COLLECTION

20.12.2022

The Leopold Museum’s first new presentation in 2023 launches on 26th January, more than 10,000 kilometers away from Vienna, in Japan. The Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum shows the exhibition Egon Schiele. From the Collection of the Leopold Museum dedicated to the Young Genius in Vienna 1900. It is the most comprehensive and representative presentation of highlights from the Leopold Collection in Asia to date (shown until 9th April 2023).

At the Leopold Museum, visitors can enjoy the museum’s permanent presentation Vienna 1900. Birth of Modernism, which is supplemented by “noble guests” in the guise of new permanent loans and acquisitions. As of now, the strengths of the museum’s collection are also represented in the digital sphere with our new ONLINE COLLECTION. Two current temporary exhibitions remain on display until February: The presentation dedicated to the Viennese artists’ association Hagenbund (until 6th February 2023) and the exhibition Tilla Durieux. A Witness to a Century and Her Roles (until 27th February 2023).

From 5th April, the Leopold Museum will host an unprecedented exhibition highlight: 200 works from the Würth Collection – Germany’s most eminent private collection comprising some 20,000 objects – will be shown for the first time in Austria. Spanning two entire exhibition floors, the presentation will feature select art treasures from Classical Modernism to contemporary art, including whole rooms devoted to Pablo Picasso, Max Beckmann and Georg Baselitz. In the autumn, the Leopold Museum will focus on Expressionism, dedicating a long-overdue, comprehensive exhibition to the Expressionist pioneer Max Oppenheimer as well as the first retrospective in Austria on the eminent German Expressionist Gabriele Münter, which will afford profound insights into the artist’s multi-faceted oeuvre.

The museological team of the Leopold Museum will be reinforced from February with the art historian Kerstin Jesse. Leopold Museum Director Wipplinger: “We are delighted to be welcoming Kerstin Jesse, an experienced researcher and established expert on Vienna 1900, into the Leopold Museum’s team.” Born in Klagenfurt in 1975, the art historian has worked since 2008 at the Belvedere, most recently as curator and research assistant for the museum’s collection of 20th-century art. She has curated exhibitions on Egon Schiele, Alfred Wickenburg and Georg Eisler, the themed exhibitions True to Life. Realist Painting from 1850 to 1950 (together with Franz Smola) and Paths to the Future. Female Artists of the Art Club (as part of a curator collective), and acted as assistant curator to the project Sin and Secession. Franz von Stuck in Vienna.

 

THE EXHIBITIONS IN DETAIL

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VIENNA 1900. BIRTH OF MODERNISM

Since 16th March 2019
Curator: Hans-Peter Wipplinger

The permanent presentation affords insights into the wealth of artistic and intellectual achievements of this era with their cultural, social, political and scientific implications. Based on the collection compiled by Rudolf Leopold, and complemented by numerous loans, the exhibition conveys the atmosphere of the world’s former cultural capital and highlights the sense of departure, characterized by contrasts, prevalent around 1900. Over three floors and more than 3,000 m² of exhibition space, the presentation features some 1,300 exhibits. Spanning the period from around 1870 to 1930, the exhibition stands out on account of its great diversity of media, ranging from paintings, graphic works, sculptures and photographs via archival materials, glass, ceramics, metal, textiles, leather and jewelry, all the way to items of furniture and furnishings of entire apartments. The exhibition is regularly supplemented with new loans and acquisitions, such as the painting The Altar of Dionysus by Gustav Klimt (1886) and Hans Makart’s triptych Modern Cupids (1868) which the Leopold Museum has recently received as private donations. In the new year, the “cupids” will be displayed for the first time after their restoration. The presentation’s Schiele rooms will feature “noble guests” – loans from private collections, for instance from the Ernst Ploil, Gradisch and Gisela Kleine collections. Additionally, photographs, graphic works and archival materials are regularly replaced for conservational reasons, allowing for new juxtapositions and fresh perspectives.

 

HAGENBUND. FROM MODERATE TO RADICAL MODERNISM

16th Sept. 2022 – 6th Feb. 2023
Curators: Dominik Papst, Stefan Üner, Hans-Peter Wipplinger

The exhibition presents eminent positions of the artists’ association Hagenbund, from its moderately Modernist beginnings overshadowed by the Secession to its ground-breaking, avant-gardist achievements throughout the 1920s and 30s. The Hagenbund went on to establish itself as the “most radical group” (Robert Musil, 1922) among Viennese artists’ associations before the group’s activities came to an abrupt end: When the National Socialists took power in 1938, numerous members were forced to emigrate, while others – like Robert Kohl and Fritz Schwarz-Waldegg – were murdered in concentration camps. The exhibition features works by Ludwig Ferdinand Graf, Franz Barwig, Rudolf Junk, Robert Kloss, Lilly Steiner, Josef Floch, Carry Hauser, Georg Jung, Bettina Ehrlich-Bauer, Otto Rudolf Schatz and many others. As opposed to previous Hagenbund presentations, the exhibition assembles a specific selection of those eminent Austrian positions that mark the group’s artistic highlights.

 

TILLA DURIEUX. A WITNESS TO A CENTURY AND HER ROLES

14th Oct. 2022–27th Feb. 2023
Curator: Daniela Gregori

She was a celebrated star of the film and theater, a modern woman of the 1920s, politically active and perhaps the most portrayed woman of her time. Via her first stints at various theaters, the Vienna-born and Berlin-based actress made it to Berlin to play under Max Reinhardt at the Deutsches Theater, where she celebrated her breakthrough as Salome in Oscar Wilde’s play of the same name. Over the years, she appeared in all the major European theaters as well as on the silver screen. The roles played by Tilla Durieux (1880–1971) were as varied as the list of artists who portrayed her, which includes Auguste Renoir, Max Slevogt, Franz von Stuck, Charley Toorop, Ernst Barlach, Oskar Kokoschka, Max Oppenheimer, Frieda Riess and Lotte Jacobi. The comprehensive presentation is the first to highlight Durieux’s social and artistic environs as well as her life which, shaped by political upheaval, spanned almost an entire century.

 

AMAZING. THE WÜRTH COLLECTION

5th April 2023–10th Sept. 2023
Curator: Hans-Peter Wipplinger

The Leopold Museum presents the first comprehensive exhibition in Austria of highlights from the Würth Collection. The Würth Collection is among the largest private collections in Europe and one of the most eminent compilations of artworks worldwide. The exhibition unites works from Classical Modernism and contemporary art, and thus allows for a unique journey through 100 years of art history. The Leopold Museum’s Director and curator of the exhibition, Hans-Peter Wipplinger, personally selected 200 masterpieces from the 20,000 exhibits comprised in the collection, which will be presented on two exhibition floors. Classical Modernism is represented in the presentation with works by Max Liebermann, Max Pechstein, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Edvard Munch, Gabriele Münter, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Ferdinand Hodler, Pablo Picasso, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, René Magritte and Oskar Schlemmer, among others. Entire rooms will be dedicated to Beckmann and Picasso featuring around ten paintings each. Contemporary art is represented with works by artists including Fernando Botero, Gerhard Richter and Per Kirkeby. The artist couple Christo and Jeanne Claude, as well as Georg Baselitz and Anselm Kiefer, are accorded their own exhibition rooms. The compilation of Austrian art in the Würth Collection, the largest outside of Austria, is also emphasized in the exhibition with works by Fritz Wotruba, Maria Lassnig, Arnulf Rainer and Erwin Wurm.

 

MAX OPPENHEIMER. EXPRESSIONIST PIONEER

6th Oct. 2023–25th Feb.2024
Curator: Hans-Peter Wipplinger

This long-overdue exhibition sheds light on the ground-breaking oeuvre of the Expressionist Max Oppenheimer (1885-1954) – also known by his abbreviated signature MOPP – which has unjustly fallen into oblivion. After studies at the academies in Vienna and Prague, Oppenheimer participated in the legendary exhibitions Kunstschau Wien 1908 and Internationale Kunstschau Wien 1909 where he met progressive artists, among them Oskar Kokoschka, Albert Paris Gütersloh and especially Egon Schiele who became a close friend. Following Oppenheimer’s stay in Berlin, where he focused on Cubist tendencies, he moved to Switzerland and began his in-depth exploration of the subject of music. From 1925, he stayed in Berlin once more, where he was branded a “degenerate artist” by the National Socialists on account of his Jewish roots. Having returned to Vienna in 1931, the invasion of the National Socialists forced him to flee and emigrate to the US. The artist completed his monumental painting The Philharmonics, which shows Gustav Mahler conducting the Vienna Philharmonics and which Oppenheimer had started in 1926, only in 1952 in exile in New York, where he died lonely and penniless in 1954.

 

GABRIELE MÜNTER. RETROSPECTIVE

20th Oct. 2023–18th Feb. 2024
Curator: Ivan Ristić
Expert consultant: Annegret Hoberg

Gabriele Münter (1877-1962) was much more than just “the woman by Kandinsky’s side”. Thanks to exhibitions and publications on her oeuvre, especially during the past two decades, she has earned wide recognition as one of the leading protagonists of the German avant-garde. Now, the Leopold Museum is the first institution in Austria to dedicate a comprehensive solo exhibition to her work. Divided into ten thematic emphases, the exhibition highlights the stages of the Expressionist painter’s life, which often coincided with changes in her style and lively interest in untested techniques and subjects. Around 120 exhibits from public and private international collections afford profound insights into the artist’s multi-faceted oeuvre, which features Impressionist landscape studies, her expressive synthesis of previous experiences between 1930 and the artist’s death, as well as reflections of mundane impressions derived from her immediate environs.

 

LEOPOLD MUSEUM I ONLINE COLLECTION

The Leopold Museum’s new ONLINE COLLECTION, realized in cooperation with the design agency Bleed, currently features more than 1,400 image files of works from the Leopold Museum’s own collection and of permanent loans from private collections. The database is regularly supplemented with new video and audio contributions, geared towards adults, teenagers and children, thus offering insightful contextualizations of the collection.

The Leopold Museum’s Director Hans-Peter Wipplinger: “The ONLINE COLLECTION is an essential building block of the Leopold Museum’s long-term strategy. Along with collecting, researching and conserving, it is one of the core tasks of any museum to present and mediate art on site and, by extension, also within the digital sphere. We are committed to engaging new target audiences with art, to preserving artworks for posterity and to offering interested people all over the world free, unrestricted access to our collection.”

The range of the digital presentation spans the period from Biedermeier to New Objectivity. Alongside works by the collection’s exceptional protagonists, such as Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka and Richard Gerstl, the database further features eminent exhibits by artists including Rudolf von Alt, Hans Makart, Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, Olga Wisinger-Florian, Broncia Koller-Pinell, Tina Blau, Herbert Boeckl, Josef Hoffmann, Alfred Kubin, Anton Kolig, Albin Egger-Lienz, Koloman Moser, Max Oppenheimer, Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos, as well as examples of international art by Gustave Courbet, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, George Minne, Auguste Rodin, Ferdinand Hodler, Franz von Stuck and many others. The Leopold Museum’s ONLINE COLLECTION opens up new perspectives both to experts and an interested public.

Bleed Creative Director Astrid Fellner: “When working with a cultural institution like the Leopold Museum, it is very important to create the right user experience. Our aim was to combine the artistic experience of looking at the artworks at the Leopold Museum with the efficiency of an online search. The design of the ONLINE COLLECTION, meanwhile, seizes on architectural elements of the museum.”

 

IMPULSTANZ – VIENNA INTERNATIONAL DANCE FESTIVAL

6th July 2023–6th Aug. 2023
Artistic Director: Karl Regensburger

From 6th July to 6th August 2023, the international dance festival ImPulsTanz will once again make the City of Vienna’s stages, studios and museums the venues of its state-of-the-art performances, workshops and research projects. In 2023, the festival and its unique program will be hosted by the Leopold Museum for the sixth time, following highly successful cooperations since 2016, when the museum was used as a hybrid place between archive, installation and exhibitions, uniting a group of international artists belonging to the EU network Life Long Burning.

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