In this tour of the Leopold Museum's collection, you will closerly explore the art of Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Oskar Kokoschka, and get a general impression of the art, culture and atmosphere of the Fin de siècle Vienna.

The first part of the tour is devoted to the art of Gustav Klimt. Klimt is an artist with a biography full of dramatic events reflected in his work. In his early works, you can admire his skills as a traditional portraitist. While looking at the reconstruction of his “Faculty paintings”, you might be wondering, why they caused one of the notorious scandals in Vienna cultural circles.

You learn some details which give an unexpected insight into Klimt's recognisable style. The painting “Life and Death”, with which the author has not parted for a long time, changing the details of composition and colour solutions, will tell us not only about the “kitchen” of the creative process but also about the principles of the art of our time.

Egon Schiele's works are often characterised as scandalous. In the collection of the Leopold Museum you will see his exhibitionist self-portraits, still lifes, urban landscapes, whose space is built not on a topographical but on an emotional principle. Schiele is the perfect artist to illustrate the connection between the creative act and the movements of the soul.

In the Leopold Museum exhibition, you will see the paintings by Oskar Kokoschka and find out on what basis this extraordinary artist claimed to be able to “paint a portrait of the soul” of his portrait subjects.

Klimt, Schiele and Kokoschka are three names of the Viennese art scene of the early 20th century, whose works concentrate the concepts and images of a complex andexiting period of fractured eras. A tour of the Leopold Collection allows you to understand and experience the intriguing interweaving of ideas and personalities that shaped the consciousness of their time.