The Leopold Museum, housed in the Museumsquartier in

Vienna en, Viennese , iso_code = AT-9 , registration_plate = W , postal_code_type = Postal code , postal_code = , timezone = CET , utc_offset = +1 , timezone_DST ...

Austria Austria, , bar, Östareich officially the Republic of Austria, is a country in the southern part of Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine states, one of which is the capital, Vienna, the most populous ...

, is home to one of the largest collections of modern

Austrian art Austrian culture has been influenced by its past and present neighbours: Germany, Hungary, Slovenia, Italy, and Bohemia. Music Vienna, the capital city of the 2nd Republic of Austria had long been an important centre of musical innovatio ...

, featuring artists such as

Egon Schiele Egon Leo Adolf Ludwig Schiele (; 12 June 1890 – 31 October 1918) was an Austrian Expressionist painter. His work is noted for its intensity and its raw sexuality, and for the many self-portraits the artist produced, including nude self-portr ...

Gustav Klimt Gustav Klimt (July 14, 1862 – February 6, 1918) was an Austrian symbolist painter and one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Secession movement. Klimt is noted for his paintings, murals, sketches, and other objets d'art. Klimt's prim ...

Oskar Kokoschka Oskar Kokoschka (1 March 1886 – 22 February 1980) was an Austrian artist, poet, playwright, and teacher best known for his intense Expressionism, expressionistic portraits and landscapes, as well as his theories on vision that influenced the ...

and

Richard Gerstl Richard Gerstl (14 September 1883 – 4 November 1908) was an Austrian painter and draughtsman known for his expressive psychologically insightful portraits, his lack of critical acclaim during his lifetime, and his affair with the wife of Ar ...

. It contains the world's largest Egon Schiele Collection. The more than 5,000 exhibits collected by Elisabeth and

Rudolf Leopold Rudolf Leopold (1 March 1925 – 29 June 2010) was an Austrian art collector, whose collection of 5,000 works of art was purchased by the Government of Austria and used to create the Leopold Museum, of which he was made director for life. Clai ...

over five decades were consolidated in 1994 with the assistance of the Republic of Austria and the National Bank of Austria into the Leopold Museum Private Foundation. In 2001 the Leopold Museum was opened. The core of the collection consists of Austrian art of the first half of the 20th century, including key paintings and drawings by Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt, showing the gradual transformation from the

Wiener Secession The Vienna Secession (german: Wiener Secession; also known as ''the Union of Austrian Artists'', or ''Vereinigung Bildender Künstler Österreichs'') is an art movement, closely related to Art Nouveau, that was formed in 1897 by a group of Austri ...

, the

Art Nouveau Art Nouveau (; ) is an international style of art, architecture, and applied art, especially the decorative arts. The style is known by different names in different languages: in German, in Italian, in Catalan, and also known as the Modern ...

Jugendstil ''Jugendstil'' ("Youth Style") was an artistic movement, particularly in the decorative arts, that was influential primarily in Germany and elsewhere in Europe to a lesser extent from about 1895 until about 1910. It was the German counterpart of ...

movement in Austria to Expressionism. The historical context is illustrated by major Austrian works of art from the 19th and 20th centuries.

Controversy

Nazi-looted art

Egon Schiele - Portrait of Wally Neuzil - Google Art Project

The Leopold Museum has been involved in numerous controversies concerning Nazi looted art. In 1997, a ''

New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...

'' profile of Leopold described him as a "too passionate" collector, whose tough tactics had led him to keep Nazi looted art, including Schiele's ''

Portrait of Wally ''Portrait of Wally'' is a 1912 oil painting by Austrian painter Egon Schiele of Walburga "Wally" Neuzil, a woman whom he met in 1911 when he was 21 and she was 17. She became his lover and model for several years, depicted in a number of Schiele ...

'', which had belonged to the Jewish art dealer Lea Bondi Jaray. After many dramatic court actions, a settlement was finally reached after Dr. Leopold's death. “Leopold knew the painting was stolen,” art lawyer Nicolas O’Donnell explained, “He had always known it. With his arrogance and pride out of the way, a real negotiation was possible.” In 2008, Austria’s Green Party and the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde (IKG) publicly accused the museum of "holding art that was stolen by Nazis from Jewish owners" alleging that ''Houses on the Lake'', 1914, by Egon Schiele, had been "stolen by the Nazis from Jewish owner Jenny Steiner". In 2016 the museum reached a settlement concerning five works by Schiele with the heirs of Karl Maylaender, who died after being deported to a labor camp during World War Two.

''Naked Men''

In 2012, following a public outcry, the museum's largest street posters for the ''Nackte Männer'' (English: ''Naked Men'') exhibition by

Ilse Haider Ilse Haider (born 1965 in Salzburg) is an Austrian artist. She focuses on photography and her photographic works use three dimensional surfaces. She has received a number of awards for her work and her work has appeared in exhibitions throughout ...

, displaying one of the exhibition's most prominent artworks, entitled ''Vive la France'' (a depiction of three naked French footballers, with their genitals fully revealed: the first black, the second Arab/Muslim and the third white, by the French artists

Pierre et Gilles Pierre Commoy and Gilles Blanchard, also known as Pierre et Gilles, are French artists and romantic partners. They have been producing works together since 1976, creating a world where painting and photography meet. Their art is peopled by their ...

), were amended by the artists themselves, by the addition of a red ribbon or stripe to cover the players' genitals.

Gallery

References

External links

Leopold Museum

Diethard Leopold about the permanent Exhibition of the Leopold Collection (Video by CastYourArt)

Tracey Emin & Egon Schiele "Where I Want to Go" at Leopold Museum Vienna - WhenWhereWh.at Interview with Diethard LeopoldVirtual tour of the Leopold Museum
provided by

Google Arts & Culture Google Arts & Culture (formerly Google Art Project) is an online platform of high-resolution images and videos of artworks and cultural artifacts from partner cultural organizations throughout the world. It utilizes high-resolution image technol ...