Künstlerhaus Vienna

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Artist house

The Künstlerhaus is an exhibition building in the city center of Vienna ( 1st district ). It is located in the Ringstrasse zone between Akademiestrasse , Bösendorferstrasse and Musikvereinsplatz, next to the Vienna Musikverein building , and has its main entrance from Karlsplatz .

The building was erected between 1865 and 1868 and has since served as an exhibition center for painting, sculpture, architecture and applied arts and the like. a. for the International Special Exhibition of the Graphic Arts Vienna 1883 . The owner is the Society of Fine Artists Austria, Künstlerhaus , the oldest existing artists' association in Austria. Since 1949 the Künstlerhaus (with the entrance on its side on Akademiestraße) has operated the “Künstlerhaus-Kino”, into which the “Stadtkino” run by the Viennale film festival moved in September 2013 - it has been called the Stadtkino im Künstlerhaus since then - and since 1974 a theater that has been operating under the name brut Wien since 2007 . In November 2015, it was decided to found a new operating company.

Due to renovation work, the Künstlerhaus on Karlsplatz was closed. The former Altmann`sche textile factory in Vienna - Margareten (Stolberggasse 26) served as temporary alternative quarters . The reopening of the main building on Karlsplatz was on March 6, 2020.

The artists' association

Künstlerhaus Vienna (1883)
Poster for the anniversary exhibition in 1898

In the suburb of Laimgrube , which was incorporated into Vienna in 1850 as part of the new Mariahilf district , there was the corner of Untere Stattengasse (since 1862 Dürergasse ) and Canalgasse (since 1902 Joanelligasse ) the inn "Zum Blaue Strauss". There the architect Leopold Ernst completed a neo-Gothic ballroom in 1846 (no longer preserved), at a huge cost overrun. This hall was the meeting point of the Association of Young Artists and Academics , which was founded in 1851 and later renamed the Albrecht Dürer Association .

In 1861 the artists' associations Eintracht and Albrecht-Dürer-Verein merged under the name of the Cooperative of Visual Artists Vienna to represent Viennese painters, sculptors and architects at the time. In 1868 they moved into the new house. There was on March 24, 1897 the XXV. Annual exhibition opened. This was shortly before 20 progressive artists (among them Gustav Klimt , Koloman Moser , Josef Hoffmann and Joseph Maria Olbrich ) split off from the cooperative of the Künstlerhaus and founded the Vienna Secession . With this, the Künstlerhaus lost its function as the then decisive interest group for all Viennese artists.

Since 1972 the association has also been open to representatives of the applied arts. In 1976 it was renamed the Society of Fine Artists Austria, Künstlerhaus , while maintaining the cooperative legal form . Film and audiovisual artists have also been members since 1983. The Künstlerhaus-Ges. m. b. H. also organizes exhibitions for other museums and institutions. Since June 2019, President Tanja Prušnik has been the first woman to head the association.

Building history

The artist house around 1900
Exhibition: Space Inventions (2010)

After Emperor Franz Joseph I's decision to have the city ​​walls demolished at the end of 1857, Vienna's Ringstrasse was planned and built as a representative boulevard and opened by the Emperor in 1865, the year construction began on the Künstlerhaus. The city ​​expansion fund set up at the Ministry of the Interior had the task of utilizing the former military site and sold most of the land to private investors. Cultural institutions, to which the fund provided land free of charge, should contribute to the attractiveness of the new ring road zone. These facilities included the Künstlerhaus and the Musikverein, which were given land opposite the Karlskirche on the bank of the Vienna River , which at that time was still open .

The architect of the Künstlerhaus was August Weber (1836–1903), who built the horticultural building on Parkring in 1863/64 . It was based on the style of an Italian Renaissance villa by Jacopo Sansovino . The Viennese company Anton Wasserburger carried out all the stone carving work , primarily St. Margarethener and Wöllersdorfer stone as well as Kaiserstein from Kaisersteinbruch . Franz Joseph I set the keystone .

The building, which opened on September 1, 1868 - almost nine months before the nearby kk Hofoper and 16 months before the neighboring Musikverein - received a larger extension in 1882, namely the two side wings, which later housed a cinema on the left in 1949 and a theater on the right in 1974 ; in the same year the first international art exhibition was held in the artist house . In 1888 the inner garden was covered.

In the last decade of the 19th century, construction work began on the Vienna Stadtbahn and the partial vaulting of the Wien River. The Stadtbahn station immediately adjacent to the Künstlerhaus has been in operation since 1899 (since 1980 exclusively an underground station ), designed by Otto Wagner . In 1899/1900 the vaulting of the Vienna River was also completed, so that the front of the Künstlerhaus was no longer on a river bank, but on the edge of the new, large Karlsplatz , named in 1899 .

Further alterations were carried out in 1887 by Julius Deininger (interior alteration , relocation of the entrance to the south front), in 1911 by Wilhelm Jelinek , in 1913 by Siegfried Theiss and Hans Jaksch .

In 1956/57 the donor's hall underwent massive modernization.

2001–2003 the square towards the Musikverein was redesigned, and the underground rooms facing Karlsplatz also date from this period.

Building speculation

Künstlerhaus 1st Floor Exhibition: Megacool 4.0 (2012)
Exhibition: Munkácsy. Magic & Mystery (2012)
Exhibition: Relationship Work. Art and Institution (2011)

In the 20th century, the building, which was unusually low for the Ringstrasse area, came under speculative pressure to demolish or at least add another storey several times. For example, the Kaym / Hetmanek plan in the early 1930s provided for the historicist pavilion to be replaced by eight-storey apartment buildings, and in 1935 the young Roland Rainer thought about “structural densification” at this prominent location.

The guidelines of the Karlsplatz planning competition made it clear in 1946 that the City of Vienna considered the Künstlerhaus and the tourist office building at the other end of Karlsplatz to be dispensable (both still exist today). Also worth mentioning is the office building planned by Karl Schwanzer for IBM in 1966 instead of the Künstlerhaus, which, however, met with widespread dissatisfaction among the population and the media. The Florianikirche case in the summer of 1965 probably led to a rethink here.

Current usage and planning

Today, planning considerations are underway again to integrate the Künstlerhaus more strongly into the museum cluster on Karlsplatz through extensions and renovations . For example, the result of an architectural competition carried out in 1999, which intended to replace the two side wings with glass pavilions, was brought into play again by Beppo Mauhart in July 2010.

The Vienna Museum , located on the southeast side of Karlsplatz , opened in 1959 as the Historical Museum of the City of Vienna, has repeatedly rented the Künstlerhaus for exhibitions for months; among them were:

  • 1985: dream and reality. Vienna 1870–1930 (Director Robert Waissenberger ), designed by Hans Hollein ; Vienna record with 622,000 visits to date
  • 1987: Biedermeier and Vormärz (management Günther Düriegl), designed by Boris Podrecca
  • 2004: Old Vienna. The city that never was (Director Wolfgang Kos)
  • 2009/2010: fight for the city. Politics, art and everyday life around 1930 (Director Wolfgang Kos)

There were therefore considerations of transferring the Künstlerhaus to the administration of the Vienna Museum, which was suffering from a lack of space, but the artists' association could not get used to it. In the meantime, this is no longer considered in the Vienna Museum either and is discussed with the city administration as to where a new building could be built for the museum.

The Kunsthistorisches Museum has the Artists' House in the Direktionsära Wilfried Seipel also benefited in the last decade of the 20th century for exhibitions. Later, the Ministry of Education did not provide any more funds for this, which opened up a considerable gap in the budget of the Künstlerhaus.

In 2011, it was publicly discussed that building damage would require a lot of money for repairs, but that the artists' association could not generate these funds from the ongoing operation of the Künstlerhaus. However, the institutions eligible as grant providers, the Ministry of Education and the cultural department of the Vienna City Administration, have to struggle with budget problems themselves. Instead, in November 2015, at an extraordinary general meeting of the Society of Fine Artists Austria, it was decided to found a new operating company, in which the family private foundation of Hans-Peter Haselsteiner holds 74 percent and the Künstlerhaus holds a blocking minority of 26 percent. The agreement made provides that Haselsteiner's Foundation will finance the costs for the structural renovation of the building in the estimated amount of 30 million euros as well as the annual maintenance costs of around 700,000 euros and in return receive part of the usable area. The renovation work should be completed in 2018. In mid-July 2018 it was announced that the opening would be delayed by a year, the reason given is that investments in air conditioning will be made in the course of this. The Künstlerhaus reopened on March 6, 2020 ( Albertina Modern ).

theatre

brut in the Künstlerhaus ( popfest 2013)

Since the conversion of the right wing into a theater in the mid-1970s, the Komödiantenhaus-Theater was located there until 1985 . After its end, there were considerations to revitalize the theater as a political stage, the Künstlerhaus . On the part of the City of Vienna and the then Cultural Councilor Ursula Pasterk was decided in 1987, the theater along with the equally empty theater in the concert hall of the independent theater groups to put the city. On January 31, 1989, dietheater , supported by the Vienna Theater Association , took over the two venues under the artistic direction of Christian Pronay. Until 2007, the dietheater served as a stage for various Austrian, especially Viennese, theater groups; the imagetanz festival, which is held there every year, has been dedicated to contemporary dance since then .

Thomas Frank and Haiko Pfost, who were nominated as new artistic directors by City Councilor for Culture Andreas Mailath-Pokorny on November 20, 2006, were able to win the re-tendering of artistic directors by the theater association in summer 2006 . This was followed by a conversion or renovation of the venue and the renaming of dietheater to brut Wien ("brut im Künstlerhaus" and "brut im Konzerthaus"). The reopening as a stage for off-theater productions, dance, performances and concerts took place on November 9, 2007.

Cinema in the Künstlerhaus ( Viennale 2009)
City cinema in the Künstlerhaus ( VIS 2014)

In 2018 Tim Voss took up his position as artistic director. In March 2020, the Künstlerhaus is to return from the alternative quarter in Vienna-Margareten to the renovated main building on Karlsplatz. Tim Voss then only wants to be a consultant with a work contract.

movie theater

The cinema in the Künstlerhaus was built between 1947 and 1949 with the conversion of the left wing previously used as an exhibition hall according to plans by the architect Alfons Hetmanek . The large-scale pictures on the side walls of the cinema, allegorical depictions of fine art, music, poetry, film and theater, are by Rudolf Eisenmenger and Rudolf Holzinger . Until 1966, Leopold Hauer was the artistic director responsible for the program. Austrian premieres of works by Jean Cocteau , Jacques Tatis and René Clair were shown here .

After it was previously one of the cinemas showing films as part of the Viennale Film Festival, it has been one of the festival venues again since 2005. In 2009 the renovation and technical renewal of the cinema began. At the end of 2012, the Künstlerhaus signed a 20-year contract with the Viennale, according to which the “ Stadtkino ” gave up its location on Schwarzenbergplatz and, opened on September 26, 2013, moved here as the “Stadtkino im Künstlerhaus”.

literature

  • Wladimir Aichelburg : The Wiener Künstlerhaus 1861–1986. 125 years in image documents. Kunstverlag Wolfrum, Vienna 1986, ISBN 3-900-178-04-6 .
  • Wladimir Aichelburg: The Wiener Künstlerhaus 1861–2001. Austrian Art and Culture Publishing House, Vienna,
    • Volume 1: The artists' cooperative and its rivals Secession and Hagenbund. Vienna 2003, ISBN 3-85437-189-6 ( Monographs on the art of Austria in the twentieth century. Volume I / 1).
  • Robert Schediwy : City Pictures. Reflections on the change in architecture and urbanism. Lit, Vienna 2004, ISBN 3-8258-7755-8 .
  • Peter Bogner , Richard Kurdiovsky, Johannes Stoll (eds.): The Wiener Künstlerhaus. Art and institution. Vienna 2015, ISBN 978-3-902850-02-7 .

Web links

Commons : Künstlerhaus Wien  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Will be reopened today Künstlerhaus new: Treasure house in the heart of Vienna. In: kleinezeitung.at. March 6, 2020, accessed March 6, 2020 .
  2. ↑ Leopold Ernst in the Vienna Architects Dictionary 1770–1945 , accessed on December 1, 2018.
  3. ^ Walter Koschatzky : Rudolf von Alt. 2nd Edition. Böhlau, Vienna 2001, ISBN 3-205-99397-7 , p. 214. ( limited preview in Google book search)
  4. ↑ Exhibition catalog with pictures: Catalog of the XXV. Annual exhibition in Vienna . Publishing house of the cooperative of visual artists Vienna, Vienna 1897 ( archive.org ).
  5. ^ Künstlerhaus , Austria Lexikon, as of March 12, 2010
  6. ↑ Internet presence Künstlerhaus , imprint
  7. ↑ Olga Kronsteiner: Künstlerhaus: Two-thirds majority for Haselsteiner. Der Standard , November 17, 2015, accessed February 17, 2016 .
  8. ↑ Künstlerhaus opening is delayed. In: wien.orf.at. July 18, 2018, accessed November 12, 2018 .
  9. ↑ Will be reopened today Künstlerhaus new: Treasure house in the heart of Vienna. In: kleinezeitung.at. March 6, 2020, accessed March 6, 2020 .
  10. ^ Brut Wien: History ( Memento from July 15, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
  11. ↑ Künstlerhaus: Artistic director announces orf.at, December 19, 2019, accessed December 20, 2019.
  12. ^ Künstlerhaus Kino: Information about the cinema
  13. ↑ Der Standard : Stadtkino will definitely move to the Künstlerhaus , December 20, 2012

Coordinates: 48 ° 12 ′ 2 ″  N , 16 ° 22 ′ 18 ″  E