100,000TH VISITOR TO THE EXHIBITION "TIMES OF CHANGE. EGON SCHIELE’S LAST YEARS"

25.06.2025

On Monday, 23rd June, the Leopold Museum’s Director Hans-Peter Wipplinger welcomed the 100th visitor to the large-scale Schiele exhibition Times of Change. Egon Schiele’s Last Years: 1914–1918 – only three months after the presentation first opened. Director Wipplinger congratulated Carla Wolf from Vancouver, Canada, who traveled with her partner Zella Baran to Vienna especially to see this exhibition. Prior to their trip to Vienna, they had met up with their Austrian friends in Trieste. Presently, they are staying with friends in Mödling, and will soon leave for London. It was their second time in Vienna; already during their first stay, they had visited the Leopold Museum and other cultural institutions. Carla Wolf is an artist who adores Schiele, while Zella is a violinist who plays with various orchestras including the Ambleside Orchestra, Vancouver. Under the benevolent eye of Egon Schiele, Hans-Peter Wipplinger presented the two ladies with a colorful flower bouquet and the English edition of the exhibition catalogue Egon Schiele. Last Years.

About the Exhibition at the Leopold Museum

Featuring more than 130 works, the exhibition Times of Change at the Leopold Museum trains the spotlight for the first time on the eminent Expressionist Egon Schiele’s (1890–1918) late oeuvre. The eccentric exceptional artist only had around ten years of activity before he died at the age of 28 from the “Spanish Flu”. Throughout this decade, Schiele created a comprehensive oeuvre, which is best known for his key paintings and drawings in which he addressed his own mental states as well as the self-questioning of an entire generation. Schiele’s later oeuvre, which he created from 1914 and which differs distinctly from his earlier works, is much less known. During those later years, his strokes not only became calmer, more fluent and organic but his figures further gained physical presence and realism. Retrospectively, we can say that the changes that occurred in his private life and the historical events that happened from 1914 onwards – the outbreak of war, his wedding to Edith Harms (1893–1918) and his difficult life as a soldier – had a lasting impact on his oeuvre. The exhibition, curated by Kerstin Jesse and Jane Kallir, weaves together biographical and artistic aspects which shed new light on this last period in the artist’s life. The presentation showcases hitherto unknown archival material, including Edith Schiele’s diary, which is published for the first time in its entirety in the exhibition catalogue.

“With its Schiele collection, featuring 300 works, 48 of which are paintings, the Leopold Museum is home to the world’s largest and most eminent compilation of masterpieces by this extraordinary protagonist of Austrian Expressionism. This is owed to the far-sighted feel for the quality and singularity of works of art and the obsessive passion for collecting that characterized the ophthalmologist Rudolf Leopold (1925–2010). He and his wife Elisabeth Leopold (1926–2024) shared their unending enthusiasm for the painter and draftsman, who at the beginning of their collecting activities – in the 1950s – had been all but forgotten. Today, Egon Schiele numbers amongst the most renowned artist personalities in the world.”

Hans-Peter Wipplinger, Director of the Leopold Museum

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