Leopold Museum marks 25 years with free entry
Sunday 20th September 2026 on 00:15 in
Austria
The Leopold Museum in Vienna is marking its 25th anniversary on Sunday with free admission and guided tours of its permanent exhibition, ORF reports. The museum was made possible by the extensive private collection assembled by Rudolf and Elisabeth Leopold.
The permanent exhibition, “Vienna 1900,” presents what the museum describes as the world’s most comprehensive display of works by Gustav Klimt and Oskar Kokoschka. It focuses on art from around 1900 and Austrian Expressionism.
The collection includes Klimt paintings such as his Attersee landscapes and “Death and Life”, as well as works by Egon Schiele and Richard Gerstl. Furniture associated with New Viennese Modernism, photographs, music contributions and decorative art from the Wiener Werkstätte also form part of the exhibition.
The exhibition takes visitors on a journey through the transition to modernism at the beginning of the 20th century. Sunday’s tours, held under the title “Life Stories and Favourite Works”, will also explore episodes from Rudolf Leopold’s life.
Leopold held more than 5,200 works in his private collection. In 1994, he and Elisabeth Leopold decided to preserve it and founded the Leopold Museum Private Foundation together with the Republic of Austria and the Austrian National Bank. The couple contributed the collection, while the state and the bank agreed to build the museum and help finance its operations.
The museum officially opened on September 20, 2001. It has since attracted around nine million visitors and is now the most visited institution in Vienna’s MuseumsQuartier. Its collection has grown to about 9,000 objects.
Free admission will be available on Sunday, September 20, with free tours of “Vienna 1900” held every hour between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. A book is also due to be published for the anniversary.
Museum director Hans-Peter Wipplinger said the Leopold Museum aims to offer visitors a place for pause and concentrated observation in an era of fleeting information and temporary visual impressions.