Klimt, Schiele, and Viennese Art Nouveau in the Leopold Museum

The Leopold Museum collection comprises the most vivid and emotional works of the Viennese art scene of the beginning of the 20th century. This tour will take you to see the works by Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele, and Richard Gerstl to understand and experience the character of that complex and exciting era.

Gustav Klimt’s biography is an endless artistic journey. Each stage of his career is illustrated with the most characteristic canvases in the collection of the Leopold Museum. We will have a look at his early drawings to check out his portrait skills. You will also find out certain facts of Klimt’s biography that have only become known recently to see his easily recognisable style from a new perspective.

Death and Life is one of the most precious exhibits of the Leopold Museum. Klimt recreated it several times, and the history of these transformations will reveal the difficulties of an artistic process and the key principles of modern-day art to us.

Egon Schiele’s paintings and especially drawings are often considered to be excessively revealing or even pornographic. The Leopold Museum displays several famous self-portraits by Schiele, some of which can even be called exhibitionist.

Schiele’s works perfectly showcase the link between art and an artist’s spirit. We will discuss whether it was a coincidence that while Sigmund Freud, a Viennese psychotherapist, was developing such terms as “repression”, “Oedipal complex”, and “enactment”, Egon Schiele, a Viennese artist, was making portraits of his blind associates, parodies of his colleagues’ famous works, and paintings featuring dead mothers.

Klimt and Schiele were the most famous artists of the Viennese art scene at the beginning of the 20th century, but we will also get acquainted with their contemporaries, such as Koloman Moser, Max Oppenheimer, and Bronze Koller-Pinell so that you get a complete idea about the intellectual life and creative scene in Vienna at the beginning of the 20th century.

During this tour of the Leopold Museum, you will see how artists’ reinterpretation of the purpose of art led to the emergence of new artistic styles and a new outlook on the essence of art.