Vienna 1900

The Leopold Museum is presenting a totally reconfigured exhibition of Viennese art at the turn of the century. Titled Vienna 1900. From the Leopold Collection, this reassembly of core areas of the Leopold Museum’s collection will be curated in an unconventional and surprising manner by the project’s managers Diethart Leopoldand Peter Weinhäupl, in close collaboration with Rudolf and Elisabeth Leopold.

The Jugendstil, Vienna’s Art Nouveau movement, endeavoured to encompass all areas of life within a so-called „gesamtkunstwerk” („total work of art”). Its main exponents Gustav Klimt, Koloman Moser and Josef Hoffmann are synonymous with the art of the Vienna Secession around 1900. This new presentation of the Leopold Museum’s holdings – complemented by several significant works on loan – features the works from the Vienna Secession together with paintings and prints from Expressionism to the end of the First World War (Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka, Anton Kolig, Herbert Boeckl and many others) as well as several fascinating examples of Wiener Werkstätte design. Furniture, silver, glass and jewellery are presented together with paintings and graphics, showing what could be termed the most exciting era in the history of Viennese art as a unique aesthetic experience.

The unconventional manner in which this exhibition covering an entire floor of the museum is set up, opens exciting vistas for those well-versed in the subject and a compact introduction to the theme and the epoch to those new to „Vienna around 1900”. While it will help tourists gain valuable insights into the spirit of Vienna around 1900, the local public will have the opportunity to rediscover the Leopold Collection’s holdings from the turn of the century.

Photo:

Richard Gerstl

Semi-Nude Self-Portrait, 1904/05

Oil on canvas

159 x 109 cm

Inv.Nr. 637