The 1960s: Fantastic Modernism

Opening: 28 March 2011
Duration: 29 March 2011 – 15 October 2011
Curators: Berthold Ecker, Wolfgang Hilger
Project concept: Heimo Watzlik

With this exhibition exploring the art of the 1960s, MUSA continues its chronological tour of the collection of contemporary art held by the city of Vienna. In addition to supporting exhibition projects, the city initiated a program in 1951 that has strongly promoted the visual arts by buying works from the studios of Viennese artists. This acquisitions program has created one of the largest collections of contemporary art in Austria, currently containing 23.000 works by 4.000 artists.

During the second decade in the collection’s history—the time from 1960 to 1969—the department of culture acquired ca. 3.800 works by 700 artists. The program also committed considerable funds to enable the realization of 460 mosaics, sculptures, interactive sculptures for children, and, occasionally, paintings as part of its “art-in-architecture” scheme. In recent years, generous donations to the collection have brought its holdings in art from the 1960s to ca. 4.300 works in all genres and media.

The economic upturn of the 1960s and the resulting social as well as ideological shifts created a new atmosphere in Vienna that made the city a highly congenial environment for the arts. The palette of forms of artistic expression and individual possibilities and—sometimes polemical—perspectives expanded in an unprecedented fashion.

There were artists who remained committed to the aims of a moderate modernism; the group around Galerie St. Stephan, by contrast, sought to join the international avant-garde as represented by the Paris art scene. Informel and the École de Paris were the leading currents in the art of the era. In the public perception of the city, the “Viennese School of Fantastic Realism” reigned supreme; artists representing this style were sent to international exhibitions as ambassadors of Austrian culture.

In 1968, the Group “Wirklichkeiten” (“Realities”) appeared on the stage with fresh ideas; their exhibition at the Secession presented the work of young individualists who, ununited by any manifesto, interpreted the world with wit and irony. Today, these “Realities” are recognizable as a moderate and peculiarly Austrian contribution to the movement of ’68.

Besides the literary production of the “Wiener Gruppe” (Friedrich Achleitner, Konrad Bayer, Gerhard Rühm, Oswald Wiener), the most widely recognized important contribution to the international avant-garde is the work of the Viennese Actionists (Günter Brus, Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch, Rudolf Schwarzkogler), a movement that developed over the course of the 1960s and culminated in the 1968 action “Kunst und Revolution”.

Sifting through the collection, the curators, Berthold Ecker and Wolfgang Hilger, seek to trace the defining characteristics of the acquisitions policy pursued by the city and its art consultant, Robert Waissenberger, then a leading connoisseur of the Vienna scene. They asked themselves to which extent the eminent artistic accomplishments of the era found their way into the collection, and to which degree the emphases placed by the collection are in agreement with the assessments of the era by today’s art historians.

Their findings point up considerable divergences in two respects. On the one hand, developments in international contemporary art exerted a very specific influence on the Austrian scene; on the other hand, the collection does not always afford equitable representation to the various currents in art that existed at the time.

Many a work acquired during the decade may be of no more than documentary value today. But the collection also includes outstanding pieces that have already become part of the canon of Austrian art history. Taken as a whole, the list of names represented in the collection reads like a surprisingly complete dictionary of the art of the era.