Leopold Museum

The Leopold Museum stands in Vienna, Austria, within the Museumsquartier, and holds one of the largest collections of modern Austrian art. It grew out of the collection assembled by Rudolf and Elisabeth Leopold, who from the 1950s onward gathered works by Austrian artists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1994, with the backing of the Republic of Austria and the Bank of Austria, that collection passed to the Leopold Museum Private Foundation, which created the museum.

The display covers several periods. From the nineteenth century come genre scenes of the so-called Altwiene by artists such as Friedrich Gauermann, Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller and Johann Baptist Reiter, alongside landscapes, portraits and mythological scenes by Anton Romako, regarded as a forerunner of Austrian modernism. The Secession section is one of the museum's central strengths, with works by Gustav Klimt, Koloman Moser and Albin Egger-Lienz, among others. The museum also holds the largest collection of Egon Schiele, and his paintings are the most numerous in its online listing. For the interwar years, painters such as Maria Lassnig are represented, while the Expressionism that followed the Secession includes Oskar Kokoschka, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Richard Gerstl, among others.

Among the works featured in its online listing are Danae, Death and Life and Portrait of Wally, by Klimt and Schiele, or The Hermits by Schiele. The transformation of a private collection into a public foundation makes this museum a key reference for understanding Austrian painting from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.