The largest Egon Schiele collection in the world, assembled by an ophthalmologist who started buying when nobody wanted them.
Rudolf Leopold was an eye doctor who began buying Egon Schiele in the 1950s, when Schiele’s reputation had not recovered from the war and the pictures were cheap. He kept buying for fifty years. In 1994 the Austrian state bought the collection — some 5,000 works — and built this white limestone cube to hold it.
Schiele
The collection is the largest in the world: around 40 paintings and a great many works on paper, including Self-Portrait with Chinese Lantern Plant, Seated Male Nude, The Hermits and the late Reclining Woman. Schiele died in 1918 aged 28, three days after his pregnant wife, in the influenza pandemic, having painted for barely a decade. Seeing that decade laid out in one building is the point of coming.
The museum does not soften him. The rooms deal directly with the 1912 imprisonment in Neulengbach and with the difficulty of the work.
Klimt and the rest
A substantial Klimt holding, including Death and Life and a number of landscapes, which are the underrated part of his output. Kokoschka, Gerstl, Richard Gerstl’s self-portraits in particular, and a good deal of Wiener Werkstätte design — Hoffmann, Moser, furniture, glass and metalwork.
Restitution
The museum has been the subject of long-running restitution claims over works acquired from Jewish collections dispossessed after 1938. Several cases have been settled, including Houses by the Sea and, notably, Schiele’s Portrait of Wally, which was seized in New York in 1998 and returned only after a thirteen-year case and a settlement in 2010. The museum now publishes its provenance research, and some of it is displayed alongside the works. It is worth reading.
The MuseumsQuartier
The museum sits in the former imperial stables, converted into one of the largest cultural complexes in Europe. Also here: mumok, the modern art museum in its dark basalt block; the Kunsthalle; the Architekturzentrum; and a courtyard full of painted concrete loungers called Enzis, which are free and full of students.
It is a good place to spend an evening whether or not you go into anything.
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.
The Albertina
A million prints and drawings, Dürer's hare, and a permanent Monet-to-Picasso collection in the old Habsburg state rooms.
Sigmund Freud Museum
The consulting rooms at Berggasse 19, kept deliberately empty because the furniture went to London in 1938 and never came back.