Our Editor Visits The Leopold Museum in Vienna, Austria ~ Home To The Rudolf & Elisabeth Leopold Collection

Written by Calvin Wondail Thursday, 03 November 2011 21:11

In 1994, with support from the National Bank of Austria, the Leopold Museum was founded by Professor Rudolf Leopold and the Republic of Austria. The first task of the foundation was to grant public access to the comprehensive collection (over 5,700 artworks from the Leopold's private collection) through the construction of a new 11,500 m2 modern museum. The result, the Leopold Museum, occupies a striking modern building designed by Pritzker Prize winning architects Ortner & Ortner, which opened in 2001. Located in Vienna’s Museum Quarter, the building appears as a light-flooded cube of shell-white limestone. The building’s interior only allows daylight to penetrate at specific points along the length of the rooms (with side light along the breadth) and only allows one-sixth of the exhibition area to be lit by daylight from above. A few very deliberately positioned picture windows create the kind of randomness found in “bourgeois“ homes, consistent with the pictures having been painted for that certain stratum of society. The voluminous building could almost be said to house two museums, one above the other. The part of the building above ground level is entirely dedicated to the Leopold Collection, the three lower floors are mainly used for the graphics collection, temporary exhibitions, communication (the auditorium) and storage. Visitors enter at the high atrium level, and can either take the single-flight staircase to the right, or enter the Klimtsaal (Klimt gallery), the first large gallery on the left. The top of the main stairs overlooks another big gallery which is in fact accessed on a lower floor and is part of the temporary exhibition area. The staggered heights of these galleries create a mezzanine which houses the museum shop, which in turn leads up to the café above the entrance hall. The functional “confusion“ of the spatial order in the entrance area is presumably not an artistic principle but a response to a simple need, one which has been translated into an instrument of spatial perception throughout the entire museum. It is on the next floor that the whole concept of the sequence of interlocking rooms becomes clear, both in terms of the simplicity of the arrangement and the variations in the repeated basic configuration. In Addition to featuring the works of the expressionist Egon Schiele, the Leopold Museum has also made a name for itself as the museum of Viennese Art Noveau. No other museum offers a comparable cross section of the exceptional achievements of this uniquely Viennese tradition. The finest examples of turn-of-the-century Viennese craftsmanship are combined with a presentation of painting, graphic art and sculpture, providing insight into this remarkable era. Designed by artists like Kolo Moser or Josef Hoffmann and produced by the Wiener Werkstätte, these objects bear witness to the timeless elegance of art in Vienna around 1900. Visit The Leopold Museum at : www.leopoldmuseum.org/

Professor Rudolf Leopold (1925-2010) was born in Vienna, and obtained his doctoral degree in medicine in 1953. During his medical studies, he began to attend art history lectures and to collect paintings and objects of art at the same time, above all, works of the then little-respected Egon Schiele. He purchased his first painting (“The Hermits” by Egon Schiele) using the 30,000 Austrian Schillings that his mother had promised him for a car as a reward for completing of his medical studies. But Rudolf Leopold decided against the car and bought the Schiele, thus beginning his collecting career with a brilliant coup. Over the years, professor Leopold not only amassed a large and significant collection (extending to other significant Austrian artists), but became the foremost expert on Schiele, curating exhibitions of his work and publishing a critical catalogue of Schiele’s works with a detailed list of his motifs. The museum owns 44 oil paintings and 180 gouaches and watercolours by Egon Schiele (the largest collection of Egons Schiele's art in the world), as well as other Austrian art of the 20th century, including key paintings and drawings by Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Richard Gerstl, Albin Egger-Lienz, and paintings and prints by Herbert Boeckl, Hans Böhler, Anton Faistauer, Anton Kolig, Alfred Kubin, and Wilhelm Thöny. The historical context is illustrated by major Austrian works of art from the 19th and 20th centuries.The panoramic windows of the museum offer a unique view of the Vienna city centre, with Maria Theresien-Platz and the Imperial Palace.

Two exhibitions are currently on view at the Leopold Museum. "Cezanne – Picasso – Giacometti" (extended until 2 February 2011) provides an opportunity to see masterpieces from the Beyeler Foundation in Basel. The main interest of the Beyelers lay mainly in collecting “well-approved” works of art. The approval process entailed a private ambience that allowed the works to be viewed over a long period of time, under varying conditions. The main purpose was not to reflect a history of modern art but rather the deep relationship the couple had built to the work they had collected, the accent lying always on the singularity and permanence of each work. Key works by artists like Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Vincent van Gogh, Francis Bacon, Jackson Pollock, Roy Lichtenstein or Andy Warhol stand out in an abundance of distinguished names. Over time, a series of work groups emerged, for which the Beyeler Foundation enjoys worldwide acclaim. These include groups of work by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Fernand Leger, Alberto Giacometti, Paul Klee and Jean Dubuffet. A second exhibition, “Florentina Pakosta” (until 18 April 2011) provides an overview of work to date by the contemporary Viennese artist Florentina Pakosta. Her work takes socially critical realism as its starting point. Beginning in the late 1950s, Florentina Pakosta used pencil drawings and India ink works to examine anonymous character types whom she met at inns, on the streets or in train stations. Parallel to this, she was also experimenting with a cubist formal language. Over the course of time, her psychology-focused portrayals of human beings were reduced to stereotypical characters which she sometimes alienated to the point of becoming caricatures, and which occasionally even ended up as monstrosities. In the 1970s, Pakosta began creating the monumental character heads which were to garner her widespread fame. Further themes in Florentina Pakosta’s works from the 1980s are uniformity and control.