Albertina

Museum · Innere Stadt (1st)Vienna,Austria

A Habsburg palace in Vienna holding a million prints and drawings, shown a few at a time because paper fades, above twenty imperial state rooms.

The Albertina holds roughly a million prints and sixty-five thousand drawings, and shows a few dozen at a time. Works on paper fade under light, so the originals appear in rotating exhibitions and go back into the dark afterwards. What is in the store includes Dürer's watercolour of a young hare and his study of praying hands, and sheets by Michelangelo, Leonardo, Rembrandt, Schiele and Klimt. Duke Albert of Saxe-Teschen, who lived in this palace, started the collection. What is always on show is the Batliner Collection, a bright run of modern painting from Monet through Picasso and the German Expressionists, and the twenty Habsburg state rooms most visitors walk through on the way somewhere else. They are silk, gilt and parquet, restored to how the archdukes had them, and worth as much attention as the exhibition. The palace sits on one of the last remaining bastions of the old city walls, behind the opera house, and a cantilevered titanium canopy juts over the entrance ramp like a wing.

Worth knowing

Good to know

The famous drawings are usually not out — paper cannot take constant light, so Dürer's hare appears in rotation rather than permanently, and the current exhibition is what you are actually visiting.
There are two Albertinas — a separate modern-art building opened at Karlsplatz in 2020 under the same name, so a poster does not tell you which door it means.
One thing is always on the wall — the Batliner collection, Monet through Picasso, hangs permanently, so however the drawings rotate there is a fixed reason to come.

Things to do

1
Slow down in the state rooms
Twenty salons run between the entrance and the exhibition galleries — silk walls, inlaid floors, a green room, a room of yellow damask — restored to the way the archdukes lived in them. Almost everyone crosses them at walking pace on the way to something else.
2
Stand on the bastion at the end
The terrace outside the entrance is public. From it the opera house stands across the square below, the horse cabs waiting on the corner, and the roofline of the Hofburg behind you. You are on one of the last surviving pieces of the city wall, which is the only reason the ground here is this high.