Why go
The Leopold Museum is the place to understand the extraordinary burst of creativity in Vienna around 1900, when artists, architects and designers broke with tradition and laid the foundations of modern art. It grew from the private collection of Rudolf and Elisabeth Leopold, who spent decades buying works by Egon Schiele when he was still undervalued, and it opened in the MuseumsQuartier in 2001 in a limestone-clad white cube.
The museum holds the largest Schiele collection in the world, with paintings, drawings and watercolours that show his intense, often unsettling view of the human body. It also has important works by Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka and Richard Gerstl, and fine examples of furniture and objects from the Wiener Werkstätte.
What to see
The permanent display, Vienna 1900, follows the story from the founding of the Secession in 1897 to the end of the First World War. Schiele’s self-portraits, landscapes and portraits of his wife Edith fill several rooms. Klimt’s large allegory Death and Life, with its contrast of a dark figure of death and a tangle of sleeping bodies, is a highlight. Elsewhere you will find Kokoschka’s early portraits, Gerstl’s dramatic self-portraits and work by Koloman Moser and Josef Hoffmann, whose designs shaped modern Viennese interiors. Schiele died in the influenza epidemic of 1918 at the age of 28, days after his wife, and the collection follows his short career from his student years to his last works.
The museum also stages temporary exhibitions on Austrian and international modernism, usually on the lower floors. From the top floor, a window looks out over the courtyard of the MuseumsQuartier towards the domes of the imperial museums.
Plan your visit
The museum is open every day except Tuesday from 10am to 6pm, and on public holidays. Over the Christmas period, from 7 December 2026 to 10 January 2027, it opens every day, including Tuesdays, but closes on 24 December and at 5pm on New Year’s Eve. Adult tickets cost €19, and under 26s, over 65s and visitors with disabilities pay €16. Family tickets cost €21 for one adult and €40 for two adults, each with up to three children under 19.
A combined ticket with the Kunsthistorisches Museum costs €37. Allow about two hours for the permanent collection and an exhibition. Café Leopold, on the second level, can be used without a museum ticket and turns into a bar in the evening. The museum shop sells books, prints and design objects.
Tickets are sold online and at the desk, and booking ahead is rarely necessary except for major exhibitions.
Nearby
The MuseumsQuartier is one of the largest cultural districts in the world, with mumok for modern art, the Kunsthalle, the Architekturzentrum and children’s museum ZOOM around its courtyards, where the colourful Enzis benches fill with people on summer evenings. The Kunsthistorisches and Natural History museums are across the road, and the cobbled lanes of Spittelberg start behind the complex. Mariahilfer Straße, Vienna’s main shopping street, is a few minutes’ walk south.