As a foreign visitor, with only a rudimentary familiarity with art history, my experience of the Leopold Museum was probably very different from that of many Europeans, and certainly of Vienna residents and other Austrians. I had been well-acquainted with Schiele's work (from books) before my visit to Vienna, but most of Klimt's beautiful paintings were new to me.
Prior to my visit to the Leopold I had known almost nothing about the artists' lives. I learned during my visit that Schiele died at the tender age of 28. That he and his pregnant wife, who died just days apart, were victims of the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918. I also learned that traditionalists in the academy and government rejected some of Klimt's work, paintings that today are considered masterpieces, as being unacceptably unconventional -- leading Klimt to permanently alter his artistic approaches thereafter. One can't help but wonder how his later work would have been different had this not been the case.
I was also not fully unaware of the controversy that has recently gripped the legacy of the museum's primary benefactor, the collector Dr. Rudolf Leopold, whose 'sometimes questionable activities' have been alluded to by several other yelp reviewers.
During my visit the museum was holding an exhibition of works on loan from the Beyeler Foundation in Basel, featuring early 20th-century masters such as Kandinsky, Klee, and Miró.
But the pieces that made the most profound impression on me at the Leopold were from a temporary exhibition on the work of Otto Muehl, a founder of the Wiener Aktionismus movement. Apart from the strikingly beautiful combinations of bold colors in his paintings, almost all of which are untitled, it is the subjects of the paintings that are incredibly provocative. No one can visit this exhibition of raw, in-your-face displays of all the taboo subjects (fornication, bestiality, sacrilege) without being moved in some way.
(The shock of the work has only intensified as, in preparing to write this review, I have read a little more about Muehl and learned that he was convicted and jailed for several years in the 1990s for sex crimes.)
So, I highly recommend a visit to the Leopold to tourists in Vienna not only for marveling at the artistry on display in the paintings and other works, but also, and just as importantly, for learning more about the history of the times during which the artists lived. read more