Private Tour with an Art Historian of the Leopold Museum: Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Viennese Art Nouveau

The Leopold Collection includes the most striking and emotional works of Viennese art from the early twentieth century. In this art tour of the museum's collection, we take a look at works by Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele and Richard Gerstel to understand and experience the images of that complex and incredibly interesting era.

Gustav Klimt is an artist with a biography full of endless creative pursuits. Each stage of his journey is represented in the collection of the Leopold Museum by distinctive works. We will look at Klimt's early drawings to appreciate his skills as a portrait painter. You will also discover newly discovered details of his biography that offer an unexpected perspective on the artist's much recognisable style.

Egon Schiele is a perfect example to illustrate the connection between creativity and the movements of the artist's soul. We will certainly discuss whether it is a coincidence that when the Viennese psychotherapist Sigmund Freud was developing concepts such as "repression", "Oedipus complex" and "acting out", the Viennese artist Schiele painted portraits of blind associates, parodies of famous works by colleagues and paintings of dead mothers.

Klim and Schiele are two of the most famous names of the Viennese art scene at the beginning of the 20th century, but we also take a look at the work of their contemporaries Koloman Moser, Max Openheimer and Bronzia Koller-Pinel and you get a detailed insight into the vibrant intellectual life and creative scene in Vienna at the beginning of the 20th century.

In this tour of the Leopold Museum you will see how artists' redefinition of the purpose of art led to the birth of new artistic styles and a new idea of what art is.