Eminent permanent loans for the Leopold Museum
13.07.2016
Wilhelm Lehmbruck — Koloman Moser — Richard Gerstl
Wilhelm Lehmbruck’s “Kneeling Woman”
Wilhelm Lehmbruck’s important sculpture “Kneeling Woman” (1911), a true icon of art history, will as of now enrich the Leopold Museum’s permanent presentation of works by Egon Schiele. This extraordinary artwork of German Expressionism is still owned by the descendants of the artist Wilhelm Lehmbruck (1881—1919). With its presentation “Wilhelm Lehmbruck. Retrospective”, the Leopold Museum recently dedicated the most comprehensive retrospective exhibition to date in Austria to this eminent sculptor’s oeuvre. The Lehmbruck family, who acted as important lenders to the exhibition, were very much taken with this appraisal of their ancestor’s work. The Leopold Museum’s Director Hans-Peter Wipplinger’s request to be able to keep presenting Lehmbruck’s “Kneeling Woman” in Vienna as a permanent loan supplementing the museum’s collection was thus met favorably by the family.
The first encounter between Lehmbruck’s and Schiele’s art took place more than 100 years ago when the industrialist and patron Karl Ernst Osthaus, a pioneer for Modernism during the two artists’ lifetime, organized a ground-breaking exhibition presenting their works in 1912 at the Folkwang Museum in Hagen founded by him. Now, Lehmbruck’s 1911 work “Kneeling Woman” is on display at the Leopold Museum together with Schiele’s paintings from the same year “The Lyricist” and “Self-Seer II”.
Austrian Post places design drawings by Koloman Moser at the disposal of the Leopold Museum
The Leopold Museum’s Director Hans-Peter Wipplinger was able to secure a mixed lot of around 120 design drawings by the eminent Austrian artist and designer Koloman Moser (1868-1918) as a permanent loan from the Austrian Post through the agency of its Managing Director DI Dr. Georg Pölzl. Select objects from the Austrian Post’s archives have been placed at the disposal of the Leopold Museum and will feature, among other exhibitions, in the planned new presentation of the museum’s “Vienna 1900” collection to be shown from 2018. Among the works are designs for stamps – including examples commemorating Emperor Franz Joseph I’s 60 years on the throne (1908) and the Emperor’s 80th birthday (1910) — as well as for postage due stamps, badges, postcards etc. Recently, an entire exhibition room has been dedicated to Koloman Moser’s paintings within the Leopold Museum’s permanent “Vienna 1900” presentation, which also comprises posters, pieces of furniture, magazines and arts-and-crafts objects designed by the artist.
In October, a new stamp from the series “Modern Art from Austria” launched by the Austrian Post showing Koloman Moser’s painting “Lovers” (c. 1914) from the Leopold Private Collection will be presented as a philatelic highlight at the Leopold Museum.
Richard Gerstl’s “Smaragda Berg”
The Leopold Museum was further able to secure a large-scale painting by Richard Gerstl (1883-1908) as a permanent loan from a private Austrian collection. It is the portrait of Alban Berg’s sister Smaragda created in 1906/07. The work, which has recently been put on display as part of the Leopold Museum’s permanent collection, will soon feature as a loan in the Schönberg exhibition of the Jewish Museum in Paris, before being sent to a Gerstl retrospective shown at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt as well as at the Neue Galerie in New York.
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