The 1950s: »Art and Art Appreciation in Vienna«

Opening: Thursday, 5. November 2009, 7pm
Duration: 6. November 2009 – 6. February 2010
Curators: Wolfgang Hilger, Berthold Ecker

»The 1950s: Art and Art Appreciation in Vienna« marks the beginning of a series of exhibitions that will give an insight into the extensive collection of the City of Vienna’s Department for Cultural Affairs, decade by decade. Founded in 1951, the collection developed predominantly through purchases to promote artists living in Vienna. It is thanks to this that the city today owns some 20,000 works of contemporary art from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

About 2,700 of these objects (by 650 artists) were created between 1950 and 1959. These were supplemented by 550 gifts made in later years. In addition, about 900 artworks are documented by this department from the project »art in public space« that were commissioned by the City of Vienna in the 1950s.

These rich holdings provide a good cross-section of this decade and its art, with its artistic highs but also its lows. The curators Berthold Ecker and Wolfgang Hilger examine the dichotomy between the work of artists that have long belonged to the canon of art history for the 1950s and the many works that were appreciated more at that time than they are today.

The avant-garde standards of individual artists had to face a strong conservative mainstream. The exhibition features examples of works by the same artist, dating from almost the same time, which are, however, diametrically opposed. These striking pairs manifest the uncertainty of this period that was characterized by the struggle between figurative and abstract art, tradition and modernism, but also between international urban orientation and »villagey tranquillity«.

In the years after the war, Vienna had to catch up with many cultural accomplishments that in the art centres of Paris and New York had sometimes been a familiar part of art’s vocabulary for decades. The city was scarred by war but underwent major modernisation that at least healed the material wounds astonishingly quickly. By contrast, the birth pangs of contemporary art movements lasted an unusually long time in Austria, partly continuing into the 1960s.

With works a.o. by:
Kurt Absolon, Robin Christian Andersen, Louise Autzinger, Joannis Avramidis, Gustav Kurt Beck, Franz Beer, Werner Berg, Wander Bertoni, Lieselott Beschorner, Leopold Birstinger, Herbert Boeckl, Arik Brauer, Josef Dobrowsky, Walter Eckert, Georg Eisler, Fritz Fischer, Siegfried Fischer, Greta Freist, Adolf Frohner, Gottfried Goebl, Hans Grünseis, Albert Paris Gütersloh, Carry Hauser, Rudolf Hausner, Alfred Hrdlicka, Franz Hubmann, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Oskar Laske, Maria Lassnig, Anton Lehmden, Heinz Leinfellner, Franz Luby, Josef Mikl, Kurt Moldovan, Arnulf Neuwirth, Oswald Oberhuber, Florentina Pakosta, Arnulf Rainer, Otto Rudolf Schatz, Johanna Schidlo-Riedl, Robert Schmitt, Rudolf Schönwald, Karl Stark, Hans Staudacher, Curt Stenvert, Hans Stockbauer, Ferdinand Stransky, Andreas Urteil, Karl Anton Wolf, Fritz Wotruba, Franz Zülow, u.v.a.