Museum Monday: The Leopold Museum

Vienna's Temple to Total Artistic Revolution

(4 min read) The Leopold Museum offers the world’s most comprehensive immersion into Vienna's Secession movement, where visitors can experience how Klimt, Schiele, and their revolutionary colleagues reimagined art as a complete way of life.

1. Bedroom furniture and interior by Josef Hoffman, 1902.

Overview

Vienna’s Leopold Museum opened in 2001 and houses Rudolf Leopold’s (1925-2010) massive collection of Austrian modern art, assembled over five decades. But this isn’t just another modern art museum. It’s an immersion into one of Europe’s most revolutionary artistic movements — Secessionism — where painting, furniture, architecture, and decorative arts merged into a unified aesthetic vision that challenged everything the 19th century thought it knew about beauty.

While modern art outside the Secession movement per se is on display here, it is the Secession-related work that was of most interest to me and which makes this museum unique, so that is the focus of this essay.

2. The museum exterior.

The Secession movement was launched in 1897 when Gustav Klimt and his colleagues literally “seceded” from Vienna’s conservative Academy of Fine Arts, and represented more than artistic rebellion.

These artists sand designers sought to create a new visual language for the modern age, one that embraced both luxury and functionality, sensuality and geometric precision. Their motto — “To every age its art, to every art its freedom” — became the battle cry for total artistic transformation.

3. An art gallery.

As an architecture student, I went through a “Secessionist phase,” borrowing every book I could from the library on artists like Klimt and architects and designers like Loos, Hoffmann, and the Weiner Werkstaette collective. It’s extraordinary stuff, and has influenced countless designers over the past 125 years.

4. A mock up of Gustav Klimt’s studio foyer, c1903, with furniture by Josef Hoffman.

5. “Wiener Werkstatte” furniture and the idea of designing totalizing works of art.

One thing that makes many of the galleries in the Leopold Museum great is that they present complete environments, which is how Secessionist art arguably must be experienced. The museum’s galleries recreate entire interior schemes, from Gustav Klimt’s reconstructed studio to Josef Hoffmann’s bedroom suites, allowing visitors to understand how these artists envisioned daily life as an aesthetic experience. Every chair, lamp, and wall covering was designed to work in harmony.

6. Furniture, lighting fixture and painting — all by Koloman Moser, 1903-16.

7. One of several galleries dedicated (mostly) to Egon Schiele.

One Secessionist artist I never liked much back in college when I studied the movement was Egon Schiele. But the Leopold Museum has the biggest collection of Schiele art in the world, and dedicate several galleries to him, not just displaying the art but providing context as well. So while I am still not a fan, I definitely gained a new appreciation for him and found many pieces I genuinely love (see “In Detail” below.

8. Paintings and furniture by Koloman Moser.

But the Leopold’s real achievement is demonstrating how the Secessionists weren’t just another “Art Noveau” inspired movement. They created the blueprint for modern design thinking.

9. Works by Adolf Loos.

Their integration of fine and applied arts, their embrace of both luxury and mass production, and their belief that beautiful objects could transform society anticipated everything from the Bauhaus to contemporary design culture. Vienna around 1900 wasn’t just producing great art — it was inventing the modern world’s aesthetic DNA.

10. A “decorative arts” gallery.

11. Looking past a gallery dedicated to Gustav Klimt to “The Dance of the Elves” (see “In Detail” below)

Art in Detail

Here are three Notes showing fifteen paintings by Gustav Klimt, Ego Schiele, and other Secessionists:

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Practical Information

Where: Vienna, Austria

My Visit: 30 June 2022

Best For: Those with an interest in fin de siecle art movements; architects with a love for early modernism.

Pro Tip: Don’t rush through the furniture and decorative arts galleries to get to the famous paintings — the Secessionist vision only makes complete sense when you see how these artists designed entire environments, from Hoffmann's bedroom suites to Moser's integrated lighting schemes.

12. A gallery with work by Koloman Moser.