Pablo Picasso, Mediterranean Landscape, 1952, Albertina, Vienna – Batliner Collection © Succession Picasso / VBK, Wien 2009. Photo: © Fotostudio Heinz Preute, Vaduz.
Emil Nolde, Moonlit Night, 1914, Albertina, Vienna - Batliner Collection © Nolde Stiftung Seebüll. Photo: © Fotostudio Heinz Preute, Vaduz.
Marc Chagall, The Kite, 1926, Albertina, Vienna – Batliner Collection © VBK, Wien 2009. Photo: © Fotostudio Heinz Preute, Vaduz.
Pablo Picasso, Naked woman with bird and flute player, 1967, Albertina, Vienna – Batliner Collection © Succession Picasso / VBK, Wien 2009. Photo: © Fotostudio Heinz Preute, Vaduz.
Paul Klee, Blue Coat, 1940 7, Albertina, Vienna – Promised gift of the Carl Djerassi Art Trust II © VBK, Wien 2009. Photo: © Albertina, Wien – Peter Ertl.
Georg Baselitz, Someone Paints My Portrait, 2002, Albertina, Vienna – Batliner Collection © The Estate of Francis Bacon / VBK, Wien 2009. Photo: © Fotostudio Heinz Preute, Vaduz.
Edgar Degas, Two dancers, around 1905, Albertina, Vienna – Batliner Collection. Photo: © Fotostudio Heinz Preute, Vaduz.
Joan Miro, Metamorphosis, 1936, Albertina, Vienna – Batliner Collection © VBK, Wien 2009. Photo: © Fotostudio Heinz Preute, Vaduz.
Arnulf Rainer, Begging (Prostration), 1973-1975, Albertina, Vienna © Arnulf Rainer / Albertina, Wien. Photo: © Albertina, Wien. |
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Albertina
Albertinaplatz 1
+43 1 534 83-0
Vienna
Masterworks of Modern Art
from the Albertina
Permanent Exhibition
This permanent exhibition, made possible through the transfer of the Batliner Collection, is complemented by permanent loans from the Forberg and Ploil Collections, as well as an Austrian private collection that has entrusted five paintings by Gerhard Richter to the Albertina. Comprising about 260 works, the new permanent display, mounted in 29 rooms and galleries on a floor space of 3,000 square meters, takes visitors on a tour through the most exciting chapters of 130 years of art history, ranging from French Impressionism to the present. The new Albertina’s first presentation of its entire permanent collection coincides with the opening of the Carl Djerassi Room, which is devoted to Paul Klee.
The permanent exhibition, which extends over two floor levels, is introduced with paintings by Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, and Eduard Degas tracing the development of Impressionism. Works by Amedeo Modigliani, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Marc Chagall, and Kazimir Malevich offer an overview of the art of Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, German Expressionism, and the Russian avant-garde. The display is continued in the new Jeanne and Donald Kahn Galleries, with ten paintings and several ceramic works by Picasso. Works by such artists as Mark Rothko, Morris Louis, Francis Bacon, and Karel Appel lead up to the art of the second half of the 20th century.
Contemporary art is dominated by such great individual personalities as Gerhard Richter, Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, and Alex Katz. Nine watercolors by Georg Baselitz especially made for a cookbook by Herbert and Rita Batliner are the latest additions to the Albertina’s permanent collection. An entire room is devoted to the South African artist William Kentridge, whom the Albertina will honor with a retrospective in 2010. Recent acquisitions of works by contemporary artists, including Kenton Nelson and Ross Bleckner, are on view as well.
Works by Arnulf Rainer, Maria Lassnig, Hermann Nitsch, Markus Prachensky, Herbert Brandl, Elke Krystufek, Max Weiler, and Hubert Scheibl ensure the presence of Austrian contemporary art in the new permanent display. Occasionally, such as the juxtaposition of Hans Hofmann, Sam Francis, and Markus Prachensky, their works are integrated in an international context in order to demonstrate how external influences and developments were reflected in their art.
The establishment of a comprehensive permanent display ranging from the late 19th century to the present was made possible by the two great art patrons Rita and Herbert Batliner and completes the efforts undertaken to reposition the Albertina.
In 2007 Rita and Herbert Batliner transferred their precious art collection, which they had incorporated into a foundation, to the Albertina as a legacy: more than 300 paintings by Monet, Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani, Nolde, Kirchner, Malevich, Giacometti, Rothko, Bacon, Alex Katz, Baselitz, and Kiefer, to name just a few.
Rita and Herbert Batliner started collecting art in the 1950s, with their focus increasingly shifting from the masters of classical Modernism to contemporary art. By their ceding this private collection to the Albertina, the museum’s profile has lastingly been changed. It goes without saying that not a single object of the Albertina’s original collection of more than a million works of art has been lost because of this valuable addition.
With its new doctrine of a holistic presentation and perception of art, the Albertina has embarked on counteracting the isolation of drawings and prints, taking into account a universal interpretation of art history. However, only through the establishment of this new permanent exhibition has this programmatic presentation of the inseparable unity of artistic creation manifested itself in the Albertina’s own holdings: in addition to the museum’s architectural extension and the refurbishment of the lordly palace that once served as a residence for the most renowned archdukes of the Habsburg dynasty, an expansion of the museum’s collections had been envisaged from the very outset.
The Batliner Collection does not only highlight canonized Modern Art. With its acquisitions from the past twenty years, it explicitly reaches out to contemporary art as well, which was already introduced with the emergence of Modernism in the early twentieth century. The presentation of recent art history calls to mind the virulence with which Modern Art superseded nineteenth-century Historicism and the predominance of academies and art salons more than one hundred years ago.
This coherent presentation of the history of painting from 1880 to the present ensures that the Modernist era is not shoved away behind the scenes of the past as it happened with the Old Masters. The exhibition’s chronology as it is presented in the rooms and galleries reveals how the principal rivaling movements were increasingly gaining momentum before the adventure of consecutive isms broke off during the first two decades after the Second World War. The competing aesthetic systems, all of which figure in the Batliner Collection with groups of works by their principal masters, range from Impressionism and Pointillism to Fauvism and Expressionism, from Surrealism to Constructivism, the Bauhaus, and Suprematism. In the 1950s and early 1960s, the rivalries seemed to have come to a momentary standstill when the supremacy of abstractionism manifested itself. The ways to express this defiance of reality inherent to all these purist approaches embraced a wide spectrum, ranging from Color-Field Painting to Abstract Expressionism and Zero.
Until these various forms of informal, abstract, and non-objective art took hold in the 1950s, contradiction had been the impetus for artistic evolution over a period of seventy years.
On the other hand, by encompassing important works by Kokoschka, Beckmann, Chagall, Giacometti, and Bacon, as well as Pablo Picasso’s monumental late oeuvre, the Batliner Collection also reminds us that art’s exploration of reality has never been discarded entirely. On the contrary, today these masters of an approach governed by the real world virtually represent the ancestors of those great individualists now making the most relevant contributions to contemporary art: Gerhard Richter, Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, and Sigmar Polke. Thanks to the long-time support bestowed on us by an Austrian private collector who has transferred to the Albertina his set of works by Gerhard Richter, it has become possible to devote a substantial section within the newly installed permanent exhibition to these artists. Their works demonstrate that the energy of contemporary art derives from the powerhouse of their Expressionist predecessors and figurative post-war art.
The establishment of the Albertina’s permanent display has enriched this traditional museum, but has also altered its profile substantially. Museums change with each new generation, modifying their architectures and viewpoints; they expand and adapt their collections, develop new focal points for their presentations, and integrate collections that either replace the established ones or allow the old to appear in a new light. The incorporation of a new major collection is a decisive moment for every museum — a moment when certainties and allegedly steadfast traditions are put to the test.
For the Albertina, which can look back on a history of almost 250 years, the integration of Rita and Herbert Batliner’s legacy as collectors is a unique enrichment. Moreover, the old princely and the new permanent collections interlock in numerous ways. Even more than in the past, it is now possible for us to compile and organize important retrospectives and thematic exhibitions by relying on the Albertina’s core holdings.
In addition, 67 drawings, watercolors, and paintings by Paul Klee entered the Albertina last year, thanks to a donation made by Carl Djerassi. This great chemist, to whom the world owes the invention of the birth control pill and who has gained eminence as an author of scientific plays for more than twenty years, is not only an important Klee collector, but also a recognized expert on Klee’s art. Drawing upon his intimate knowledge of Paul Klee’s oeuvre, he has compiled two collections of equal standing over the past decades, which he has donated to the Albertina and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art respectively: his gift to the Albertina was meant as a reconciliatory gesture toward Austria, from where he had been driven by Hitler’s regime in 1938.
Thanks to a fortunate circumstance and the generous support of Eva and Mathias Forberg, the groups of works by Paul Klee and Der Blaue Reiter could be bolstered even further. The Swiss collector Mathias Forberg inherited parts of his father’s legendary collection, the major portion of which had been acquired during the first decades after the Second World War. Mathias Forberg and his wife Eva have pursued the expansion of this collection most consistently and with great connoisseurship. Recently they decided to transfer their collection to the Albertina as a permanent loan, thus acting in the spirit of the original Forberg Collection’s founder. This is all the more important as principal works by Kandinsky, Macke, Feininger, Moholy-Nagy, and above all Paul Klee thus intensify existing focal points within the permanent collection.
More than 150 years ago, Wilhelm von Humboldt maintained that Berlin’s museums, due to their lack of funds, depended on private collections. This absolutely applies to the Albertina as well, which owes its very existence to one of the great private collectors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Its founder has now been joined by Carl Djerassi, Eva and Mathias Forberg, and — first and foremost — Rita and Herbert Batliner. Their legacy will forever mark a legendary turning point in the Albertina’s history.
Mark Rothko, Saffron, 1957, Albertina, Vienna – Batliner Collection © VBK, Wien 2009. Photo: © Fotostudio Heinz Preute, Vaduz.
Pierre Bonnard, Gray Nude in Profile, ca. 1933, Albertina, Vienna – Batliner Collection © VBK, Wien 2009. Photo: © Fotostudio Heinz Preute, Vaduz.
Kenton Nelson, Observance, 2007, Albertina, Vienna – Batliner Collection © Kenton Nelson. Photo: © Fotostudio Heinz Preute, Vaduz. |
