Calendar

The exhibition The Body Electric: Erwin Osen and Egon Schiele, to be shown at the Leopold Museum, is a presentation based on a number of recently re-discovered drawings by Erwin Osen (1891–1970). These were commissioned by Stefan Jellinek (1871–1968), a physicist and doctor active in Vienna until 1939, who during World War I researched the use of electricity in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorders.

Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6, known as the Pastoral Symphony, inspired the Viennese Jugendstil artist and Klimt colleague Josef Maria Auchentaller (1865-1949) to create a monumental pictorial program in 1898/99 to adorn the music room at the villa of his father-in- law, the silver jewelry manufacturer Georg Adam Scheid. The ensemble, consisting of five paintings, represents the first artistic-pictorial realization of all movements of a Beethoven symphony and is a singular example of the tradition of music rooms, which experienced its heyday around 1900. Marking the 250th birthday of Ludwig van Beethoven, the ensemble will be reconstructed for the first time in Austria at the Leopold Museum, where the history of this Gesamtkunstwerk, or universal work of art, will be highlighted through a focus exhibition in the context of the permanent presentation Vienna 1900.

The exhibition presents works by eleven artists who made eminent contributions to Modernism in Austrian painting at the time of the First Republic (1918-1938): Alfons Walde, Albin Egger-Lienz, Anton Kolig, Herbert Boeckl, Gerhart Frankl, Anton Faistauer, Josef Dobrowsky, Hans Böhler, Alfred Wickenburg, Rudolf Wacker and Sergius Pauser all mark the pluralism between a reticent expressive colorism dominated by inwardness and a New Objectivity informed by a sober view of the material world.

Emil Pirchan (1884–1957) was a pioneer of Expressionist stage design, as well as an imaginative poster designer who enjoyed considerable success in the highly competitive field of advertising art. He was also a costumer, designer, book illustrator, author of several artist monographs, a novelist, teacher, and a lot more besides.