Vienna Art Walk: Klimt, Schiele & Secession

Étapes de la visite

1. 1. Hotel Secession

   📍 A hotel named for the building across the road, which is the real reason to stand here. The Secession Building of 1898 was put up by artists who had walked out of the official art establishment — Klimt among them — to show work on their own terms. Over the door: 'To every age its art, to art its freedom.' The gilded dome of laurel leaves is known to Viennese as the golden cabbage.

2. 2. Leopold Museum

   🎨 The Leopold Museum holds the largest collection of Egon Schiele anywhere — some 40 paintings and around 180 works on paper. Rudolf Leopold began buying him in the 1950s, when Schiele was still cheap and largely unwanted. There is a substantial Klimt holding too, and rooms on Vienna around 1900 more broadly.

3. 3. Mumok - Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien

   🖼️ Mumok is the dark basalt block in the middle of the MuseumsQuartier, and it holds the modern and contemporary collection. Viennese Actionism is the thing it has that nowhere else does — deliberately confrontational 1960s performance work, much of which led to prosecutions at the time. The building is worth as much attention as the art; the interior is entirely artificial light.

4. 4. Vienna Museum of Art History (Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien)

   🖼️ The Kunsthistorisches Museum holds what the Habsburgs collected over four centuries, which is to say one of the great collections anywhere. Bruegel's peasant paintings are here — the largest group in the world, including the Hunters in the Snow — along with Vermeer, Caravaggio, Velázquez and Titian. Klimt painted the murals in the stairwell as a young man, before the break with the establishment. The café under the dome is worth the stop.

5. 5. Albertina

   ✏️ The Albertina holds one of the largest collections of prints and drawings in the world — around a million prints, 60,000 drawings. Dürer's Young Hare and Praying Hands are here, though the originals are shown only rarely; works on paper cannot take the light. The Habsburg state rooms upstairs are open too, and are usually emptier than the galleries.

6. 6. Beethovenplatz

   🎼 Beethoven spent most of his adult life in Vienna and moved house something like sixty times while he was here. The monument on this square went up in 1880; the seated figure is surrounded by allegorical bronzes at the base. He is buried at the Zentralfriedhof, in the plot for composers, next to Schubert.

7. 7. Upper Belvedere (Oberes Belvedere)

   👑 The Upper Belvedere, a baroque palace built for Prince Eugene of Savoy in the 1720s, now the home of Austrian art. Klimt's The Kiss hangs here, along with the largest collection of his work anywhere, and rooms of Schiele and Kokoschka. The Austrian declaration of independence was signed in the marble hall in 1955. Buy the ticket online; the queue at the door can be long.

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