By DPA
Vienna : Visitors crowded the rooms of Vienna’s Albertina gallery, eager to see an art exhibition that is likely to change Austria’s museum landscape.
The Albertina Friday began exhibiting 295 works – including many milestones of modern art – from the private Batliner Collection.
The collection of Rita and Herbert Batliner consists of about 500 works and is regarded as one of Europe’s leading private collections. It can boast a who’s who of painting – Monet, Picasso, Chagall, Matisse and Lichtenstein, to name just a few.
The collection focuses on French impressionism and post-impressionism, fauvism, German expressionism and the Russian avant-garde movements, providing an amazing scope of 20th-century art.
The 78-year-old lawyer began collecting art by accident, when a client who could not pay his fees gave him a Toulouse-Lautrec instead. It was not easy for the collector to part with his collection for good, but in the end felt art could not be owned but was, by its nature, a public resource.
Getting the collection as a permanent loan, the Albertina got the nod over several other high-profile competitors such as New York’s Guggenheim Museum or Salzburg’s Museum der Moderne.
“We are as happy as if we had just won the lottery jackpot,” Albertina director Klaus Albrecht Schroeder said.
“It is not its quality that makes this exhibition in the Albertina unique, but the fact that this collection changes the museum,” Schroeder told journalists Friday.
With the impressive Batliner Collection, the Albertina has finished its repositioning process from a collection of graphics to a museum of modern art. Up to now, the Albertina’s collection consisted mainly of graphics, drawings and photos. This repositioning also sends impulses through Austria’s museum scene, “closing a gap,” as Schroeder said.
The country’s art museums are heavy on old masters and the Vienna expressionism focusing on Klimt or Schiele, with classic modernism sorely missing. This vacuum led to Austrians feeling alienated by modern art, not understanding it.
Schroeder received the collection from the Liechtenstein-based couple as a permanent loan, retractable only after at least 10 years. The only conditions attached concern restoration and conservation of the works, as well as the obligation to make it accessible to the public. Experts estimate its worth to be several hundred million euros.
High-points in the show, which feels like a walk-in art lesson, are a late version of Monet’s waterlilies, dating from 1917, a Renoir portrait, Robert Delaunay’s Nude and Ibises and examples of Picasso’s late work.
As a follow up to ‘From Monet to Picasso’, the Albertina will show ‘From Andy Warhol to Anselm Kiefer’ from Nov 12 onwards.