A million prints and drawings, Dürer's hare, and a permanent Monet-to-Picasso collection in the old Habsburg state rooms.
The Albertina sits on the last surviving section of Vienna’s city walls, in a palace that was the residence of Duke Albert of Saxe-Teschen, who began the collection in 1776.
It holds around a million prints and 65,000 drawings, which makes it one of the largest graphic collections anywhere. The catch, inherent to the medium, is that works on paper can only be exhibited for short periods under low light. Dürer’s Young Hare and Praying Hands are the famous holdings and are on display only occasionally; the rest of the time you see a facsimile or nothing. This disappoints a great many visitors who came specifically for it, so check the current exhibition first.
What is always there
The Batliner Collection, on permanent loan since 2007, covers French Impressionism to the mid-twentieth century: Monet, Degas, Renoir, Cézanne, Picasso, Chagall, Kandinsky, Malevich, and a strong group of German Expressionists. It is a proper collection rather than a supporting act.
The Habsburg State Rooms — twenty rooms restored to their nineteenth-century arrangement, with the original furniture — are included and are quieter than the equivalents in the Hofburg.
Albertina Modern
A separate building on Karlsplatz, opened in 2020 in the former Künstlerhaus, showing post-1945 Austrian and international art. A combined ticket covers both.
The building and the terrace
The entrance is up a ramp under a dramatic cantilevered titanium canopy by Hans Hollein, added in 2003 and still argued about. The terrace at the top, with the equestrian statue of Archduke Albrecht, looks over the Opera and along the Ring and is free to walk onto.
Below, on Albertinaplatz, is Alfred Hrdlicka’s Memorial Against War and Fascism (1988) — a group of granite and bronze pieces including The Street-Washing Jew, a figure on his knees scrubbing the pavement, referring to Jews forced to clean anti-Nazi slogans off Vienna’s streets after the Anschluss. It is deliberately hard to look at and stands where hundreds died in an air raid shelter that was hit in 1945.
Practicalities
Open daily including Mondays, which makes it useful in a city where most museums close then. Late opening on some evenings.
More Museums
Kunsthistorisches Museum
The Habsburg collection: the largest group of Bruegels anywhere, a Vermeer, and a staircase Klimt painted before he broke with the establishment.
Leopold Museum
The largest Egon Schiele collection in the world, assembled by an ophthalmologist who started buying when nobody wanted them.
Sigmund Freud Museum
The consulting rooms at Berggasse 19, kept deliberately empty because the furniture went to London in 1938 and never came back.