3 questions to Hans-Peter Wipplinger from the Leopold Museum

Hans-Peter Wipplinger, Director of the Leopold Museum, Vienna. Photography © Stefan Joham

1.What is your museum about and what is your work there?

The Leopold Museum houses a unique and astonishingly comprehensive Vienna 1900 collection. It is famous for its focus on Viennese Modernism. Especially to be emphasised are the outstanding masterpieces by Gustav Klimt, Koloman Moser and Josef Hoffman and of course the world’s most extensive collection of works by Austrian Expressionists Egon Schiele and Richard Gerstl. The museum shows also the biggest permanent presentation of works by Oskar Kokoschka.

The museum’s founder Rudolf Leopold (1925-2010), ophthalmologist and art collector, within five decades collected more than 5.000 works of art including paintings, drawings, applied art and tribal art. In 1994 the Leopold Museum – Private Foundation was established and in 2001 the newly constructed Leopold Museum has been opened to the public.

Around eight million people visited the museum in the last years. It is the most attended institution of Vienna’s MuseumsQuartier (MQ) and one of Vienna’s cultural highlights.