Leopold Museum

Located in Vienna’s MuseumsQuartier, the Leopold Museum houses over 8,800 works, including masterpieces by Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt. Its permanent exhibition, ‘Vienna 1900. Birth of Modernism,’ offers a comprehensive look at the cultural and artistic developments of the era. The museum also features works by Oskar Kokoschka, Richard Gerstl, and artifacts from the Wiener Werkstätte. Visitors can enjoy guided tours, workshops, and a café within the museum. Accessibility features include wheelchair access and free Wi-Fi.

Planning your visit

The Leopold Museum holds the largest Egon Schiele collection in the world, and it exists because one man bought him when nobody else wanted to. Rudolf Leopold, an ophthalmologist, spent decades acquiring Schiele at prices that reflected the artist's unfashionability, along with Klimt, Kokoschka and Richard Gerstl. The resulting 8,800-work collection was sold to the Austrian state in 1994 and now anchors the MuseumsQuartier in a white limestone cube. The permanent exhibition, "Vienna 1900: Birth of Modernism", is the reason to come: it sets the paintings inside the intellectual explosion of the same city and decades that produced Freud, Wittgenstein, Mahler and the Wiener Werkstätte, rather than presenting them as isolated masterpieces.

For Schiele specifically there is nowhere better. The self-portraits, the landscapes, and the work made in the few years before his death at 28 in the 1918 influenza pandemic are here in depth. Klimt is well represented too, though the Belvedere holds The Kiss. The building is calm and well-lit, wheelchair accessible throughout, and a focused visit takes around two hours.

Bookable options include skip-the-line Klimt-focused tours, masterpieces tours covering the highlights across both artists, and shorter one-hour formats built around specific temporary exhibitions — useful if you are fitting the museum around other plans. Combination tickets pair the Leopold with the Kunsthistorisches Museum, which covers an entirely different era of European painting; the two together make a substantial art day in Vienna. Because the MuseumsQuartier houses several museums in one complex, including the Mumok next door, arriving knowing which you intend to see saves real time. Current availability is listed below.