The Leopold Museum in Vienna exhibits a treasure hidden in a house for three decades

It all started with a house. An early 20th-century villa in which an Austrian businessman discovered the imprint of a forgotten architect, initiating research that has become the source of an invaluable private collection of works of art that the Leopold Museum from Vienna has just “discovered”.

In 1989, pharmaceutical businessman Fritz Schedlmayer and his wife Hermi acquired Villa Rothberger, built in 1902 in Baden, about 30 kilometers south of Vienna, and they undertake a restoration during which they discover the work of Otto Prutscher, contemporary modernist artist of Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele.

Prutscher, a representative of Viennese modernism still relatively unknown today, had profoundly modified the house in 1912, transforming a building without originality by applying the principles of Viennese modernism.

IN SEARCH OF THE FORGOTTEN ARTIST

From there the Schedlmayer family began to investigate his work and his life and acquire pieces designed by him: cabinets, display cases, glasses, vases, chairs, clocks and all kinds of rooms in which the beauty and functionality of the Jugendstil (Viennese modernism).

“Artistically, he resists comparison with Josef Hoffmann or Koloman Moser,” assures Ivan Ristic, curator of the exhibition, naming these two well-known artists.

As an example, Ristic says that while a vase designed by Hoffmann is now priced at $ 47,260, one from Prutscher can cost five times less.

According to the curator, the fact that his modernism is “less radical” may explain why his work has so far not been valued as it deserves.

Over time, the Schedlmayer couple added furniture from other Modernist artists, but also developed an interest in painting or sculpture which grew to form a collection of thousands of pieces including drawings, sketches , paintings, sculptures and furniture.

A HIDDEN TREASURE

The existence of a collection of these dimensions was only revealed when the children of the now deceased couple contacted the Leopold Museum two years ago, expressing their interest in having this treasure displayed to the public.

Until February 20, the Leopold is presenting 220 pieces, a small but very relevant fraction of this treasure, in an exhibition entitled “The Schedlmayer Collection. A discovery!”.

“The fact that in the Schedlmayer collection there were many examples of modern art painting and drawing was until now virtually unknown”, asserts the museum justifying this name for the sample.

Thus, if the interest of the Schedlmayers in the architect Prutscher, to whom another Viennese museum dedicated a sample two years ago, was known to experts, the true extent of the collection was not discovered until here.

The pictorial part of the collection has two main central axes.

On the one hand, german expressionism, of which in the sample there are examples of Karl Hofer, Heinrich Campendonk or Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.

On another side, Austrian art from the interwar period, like works by painters like Anton Kolig or Anton Faistauer.

A sum of works that can be considered among the most important private collections devoted to this period in the German-speaking world.

With this exhibition, the Leopold Museum, also founded 20 years ago by a couple of collectors, expands the “Vienne en 1900” project, a permanent exhibition launched in 2019 which explains the creative explosion, the political and intellectual upheaval that has been lived in the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

(with information from the EFE)

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