The Albertina in Vienna receives two major European private collections

The Liechtenstein endowment of the Rita and Herbert Batliner Collection containing 500 works ranging from Monet to Picasso was passed on to the Albertina in early May 2007 as a loan of unlimited term.

 

Now this is being joined by the Swiss private collection of Eva and Mathias Forberg, with around 50 paintings, drawings and graphics by Paul Klee and his contemporaries Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Lyonel Feininger and many more.

 

In Austrian museums there has been a gap until now in international classical modern art, namely, French Impressionism and Post-impressionism, the German Expressionism of the Blaue Reiter and the Brücke, the Fauves, or Russian avant-garde from Chagall to Malevich. The Albertina is now the only museum in the country to be able to fill this gap with a large number of major works.

 

From autumn this year, these two private collections, acclaimed for decades by connoisseurs and museums, will for the first time be open in their entirety to the public in major exhibitions, before they are integrated for permanent exhibition in the Albertina from spring 2008.

 

With the addition of these collections, in particular thanks to the nearly 40 Picassos in the Batliner Collection (among them ten major paintings and many drawings, graphics and ceramics), the Albertina now possesses one of the largest Picasso collections to be seen in museums today.

 

Moreover, there are other outstanding works from the Batliner Collection, among them major works by Monet (three landscapes, among them a Water Lily picture), Renoir, Cezanne, Modigliani, Matisse, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Rothko and Francis Bacon.

 

The pre-eminent works in the Forberg Collection are a Kandinsky improvisation of 1910, one of the most beautiful cubist landscapes by Feininger, and a group of nine paintings and water colours by Paul Klee.

 

In recent years, the Albertina has seen the founding of the Photographic Collection in 1999, the restoration of the Ceremonial Rooms from 2002 to 2007, and their adornment with the precious, original archducal furniture by Josef Danhauser, so the addition of these two private collections means a further significant step in the successful repositioning of this historic museum.

 

This augmentation of the Albertina collection continues the programme of recent years of showing the art of drawing and graphics as a totality along with other genres, thus opening up to a completely new and wide-ranging public an art that mainly used to appeal only to a small segment of the population.

 

Albertina, Vienna 

~ by Stampfli & Turci on August 24, 2007.