Egon Schiele and the Leopold Museum

The Leopold Museum by day:

The Leopold Museum lit at night (by the same light designers who do Pittsburgh's Festival of Lights, lighting building facades throughout the city) :

The Leopold Museum, located in Vienna’s Museums Quartier, is home to masterpieces of the Viennese Secessionist Movement, the Viennese Modernist Movement, and the Austrian Expressionist Movement. It houses the world’s largest collection of Egon Schiele, as well as major works by Gustav Klimt and Oskar Kokoshka.

Schiele, whose works dominate this museum, fulfills the stereotype of an artist who lived an extreme life. He was arrested for “immorality and seduction” and painted throughout his two-week imprisonment. He died of the Spanish Flu at the age of twenty-eight after creating more than 3,000 works of art over his young life.

Self-portrait by Egon Schiele (above)

The Leopold Museum includes an interesting gallery called the “Psychoanalysis Room.” The psychologist Sigmund Freud, also from Vienna, influenced the artistic themes of his contemporaries. Freud’s themes of dreams, sexuality, the unconscious and introspection are very present in the work of Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt, among other artists of his time. It is wonderful to imagine Freud, Schiele, and Klimt, all living there in Vienna at the turn of the century. Klimt had even painted one of Freud's patients.