Leopold Museum

Museum · Neubau (7th)Vienna,Austria

A white stone cube in Vienna holding forty-four Schieles, bought by one eye doctor over fifty years while the pictures were still cheap.

The Leopold Museum owns forty-four paintings by Egon Schiele, more than anywhere else, and one man bought nearly all of them before prices rose. Rudolf Leopold was a Viennese eye doctor who studied art history alongside medicine and bought his first Schiele in 1950, while still a student. Schiele sold for very little then, so a young man on a small income could keep buying, and he did for five decades. Schiele's self-portrait painted naked at twenty is close to life size, so you meet it at your own height. He and his wife Elisabeth signed some five thousand works into a public foundation in 1994; the state paid about a quarter of what the collection had been valued at, and the family gave the rest. What you walk into is a plain white cube in the MuseumsQuartier — white walls, oak floors, daylight doing most of the work. Since Leopold's death the museum has settled claims from families whose pictures were taken under the Nazis and later ended up in his collection.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Look for Richard Gerstl — he burned much of his work and killed himself at twenty-five in 1908, only about sixty pictures survive, and this museum holds a large share of them.
Klimt is here, but the golden Kiss is not — this museum has his Death and Life and his lake landscapes. The Kiss hangs across town in the Belvedere.
Walk into the courtyard to find the door — the entrance is not on the street front. It sits at the top of a ten-metre-wide flight of steps facing the courtyard.
Put a hand on the outside wall — it is white shell limestone from the Danube, and the same architects clad the museum across the courtyard in near-black lava stone.

Things to do

1
Line up the two portraits Schiele painted as a pair
Find the small 1912 portrait of Wally Neuzil, his model and companion, then find his own face in the Self-Portrait with Chinese Lantern Plant. He painted them as a pair, turned towards each other, so neither is complete until you have both in view. They are not always hung together.
2
Find the town Schiele painted with no sky above it
Look for the Krumau pictures. He painted this small Bohemian town from above, on a bend in the river where his mother was born. Dead City III of 1911 and Crescent of Houses II of 1915 are both here. In each one the roofs are packed edge to edge and there is no horizon at all.
3
Look out of the top-floor window over the Ring
On the top floor a window is cut through the wall. Step away from the pictures and look out. Below runs the Ringstrasse, the boulevard that circles the old town, and the domed museum across the road stands on the same axis as this building. That is the city these painters walked out into.