Egon Schiele permanent exhibition

Featuring 41 paintings and 188 works on paper, the Leopold Museum houses the largest and most eminent collection of works by Egon Schiele worldwide.

When Egon Schiele died of the Spanish Flu in 1918, aged only 28, he was regarded by many as the most important Austrian artist of his time. During the decades following his untimely death, however, he was increasingly forgotten and was posthumously labeled a “degenerate artist” by the National Socialists. In the early 1950s, the young medical and art history student Rudolf Leopold saw the works of Egon Schiele for the first time. He recognized that in their quality, expressiveness and technical mastery Schiele’s works were comparable to those of the Old Masters. The expressive artist’s powerful draftsmanship and radical modernity sparked an inextinguishable fire in Rudolf Leopold. He became a passionate collector and did all he could to help win Egon Schiele’s oeuvre and Viennese art around 1900 global acclaim. Back then, Egon Schiele’s paintings and works on paper were still readily available on the free market and were even affordable, albeit not exactly cheap – a large-scale oil painting had the approximate value of a small new car. Since then, the market price for Schiele’s works has multiplied, with his paintings now fetching double-digit million amounts. Rudolf Leopold played a vital role in helping Schiele’s oeuvre win worldwide renown and international recognition.

Along with oil paintings and graphic works, the Leopold Museum is also home to the Egon Schiele Documentation Centre dedicated to conducting research on Schiele’s oeuvre. Comprising numerous autographs, it also makes for the first time Schiele’s work as a lyricist accessible to a wider audience.

Schiele as a lyricist

While Schiele’s painterly oeuvre enjoyed considerable popularity during the artist’s own lifetime, his poetic work, created especially between 1910 and 1912, went unnoticed for a long time, although it represents an important contribution to Expressionist poetry. Most of Schiele’s original poems are part of the Leopold Collection. Many of the letters and poems were elaborately adorned by Egon Schiele and resemble graphic works. The topics are similar to those depicted in his paintings – they are personal visions of the highest expressiveness, full of color and immediacy. His extraordinarily atmospheric language is shaped by unusual word combinations and word coining, grammatically incomplete sentences and graphically positioned hyphens. In his texts Schiele wanted to “taste dark waters”, to “see wild air”, to “build white clouds” and invented “rainbow colored foam”, “race avenues” and a “wind winter land”. His tormented soul, which expressed itself in his pictorial world, also erupted in his lyricist work. An “excess of life” and “agony of thinking” featured in his poems, along with dark forces: “Demons! – break the violence! – Your language, – your signs, – your power!” exclaimed Egon Schiele. The scale of his contradictory feelings culminated in his paradoxical and final observation: “Everything is living dead”.

Since all works on paper are highly photosensitive, the drawings, watercolors and prints cannot be permanently exhibited. Aside from special exhibitions, during which works on paper are temporarily displayed, these objects are stored in the museum’s depot and are not constantly accessible to visitors. We apologize for any inconvenience and kindly ask for your understanding. Should you be interested in a specific work on paper, please ask the museum staff if it is currently on display.