BRANKOPOPOVICBLOG: Leopold Museum Vienna

EGON SCHIELE
With 41 paintings and 188 works on paper the Leopold Museum is the largest and most prominent collection with works of Egon Schiele worldwide.

WIENER WERKSTÄTTE
This movement finally led to the foundation of the Wiener Werkstätte by Josef Hoffmann, Koloman Moser and the patron Fritz Wärndorfer in 1903. It was the aim of the Werkstätte to renew the art term in the field of applied arts and to embellish the life by everyday objects designed by artists.
Following British examples, the challenge was to offer simple, elegant unique items in reply to the uncharitable and industrial replicas of past styles. A tea pot and a wardrobe were designed with just the same diligence and idealism. Everyday objects thus were elevated to an art object. All spheres of life should be designed homogenously and do justice to a modern culture. Until the 1920s the company opened up sales affiliates at the top addresses in Vienna and abroad. Nevertheless its failure loomed ahead. It was especially for the high prices of their products that the Wiener Werkstätte failed to accomplish its social cause namely to ensure that the life of everybody was embellished by everyday objects designed by artists. Until its final closure in 1932, the company always relied on the support of prosperous patrons. The Leopold Museum shows metalworks and furniture by Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser as well as selected objects by Otto Wagner and others in its permanent exhibition.

GUSTAV KLIMT
Gustav Klimt (1862 Vienna – Vienna 1918) is the greatest and most impressive person of the Austrian art at around 1900. Coming from modest circumstances, Klimt studied at the Staatliche Kunstgewerbeschule where his talent for drawing soon was discovered. Therefor he got a number of public contracts together with his brother Ernst und his university friend Franz Matsch. The panaches at the Kunsthistorisches Museum and the great paintings at the staircase of the Burgtheater testify the technical perfection of this young „Künstler-Compagnie“. However these works were entirely committed to Viennese historicism. During the 1890s Klimt was looking for different means of expression and finally founded the Secession in 1897 with other like-minded artists. Klimt was the first president of the Vienna Secession. The culmination of this development were the University of Vienna ceiling paintings that burned in 1945 in a mansion in Lower Austria. The Leopold Museum presents these major works by Klimt for the first time as black and white photographs in the original size. The radical depiction of his personal view of the world was too pessimist for the professors at the University of Vienna and led to a huge scandal at the time. As a reaction Klimt decided to never accept any public contract again and focused on the creation of lyric landscape paintings that he painted during his summer visits together with the Flöge family to the Attersee region in Upper.
After decoratively overloaded, splendid art works, his style gets softer at around 1910. The painting “Death and Life” gets created and several times over-worked. Klimt elevates the topic into something general and gives „life“ a wonderful beauty with some inherent sadness – with death standing next to it. Enfeebled by a cerebral apoplexy, Gustav Klimt dies of pneumonia on 6 February 1918.

KOKOSCHKA - THE SELF IN FOCUS (4 October 2013 - 27 January 2014)
An exhibition in cooperation with the Oskar Kokoschka-Zentrum of the University of Applied Arts Vienna
With "Kokoschka - The Self in Focus", the Leopold Museum dedicates to one of the most significant 20th-century Austrian artists an exhibition that will for the first time give a prominent place to photographs from Kokoschka’s life.
Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980) is doubtless one of the most important protagonists of modernism. His oeuvre as a painter and graphic artist, as well as dramatist, essayist and stage designer, is enormous and has an established place in the histories of both art and literature.
Up to this point, there has existed very little awareness of the fact that Kokoschka’s life and works were also documented by a multitude of photographs. Around 5,000 photos have been preserved even just in the artist’s estate, which is now held by the University of Applied Arts Vienna. These photos will now be published for the first time, in a selection featuring scholarly commentary. Photos from Kokoschka’s occupational and private circles communicate a rich and intense artistic life, while at the same time they represent a piece of 20th-century history both in terms of cultural developments and in general.
Scholarly work on these holdings gave rise to the idea of a joint exhibition project of the Leopold Museum and the Oskar Kokoschka Centre of the University of Applied Arts.