History

On September 21, 1962, in the parkland known as Schweizer Garten, mumok—Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien was opened as the Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts (later called the 20er Haus); it was housed in the Austrian pavilion, originally built in 1958 by Karl Schwanzer for the EXPO in Brussels and subsequently adapted into an exhibition building.
 

The museum’s founding director, Werner Hoffmann, was entrusted with the promising and equally challenging task of establishing a collection of modern art. In just a few years he managed to acquire important works of classical modernism and, in a concerted effort, extend the collection around some of the existing works.
 

Due to a lack of space, the museum rented Palais Liechtenstein in the Alsergrund district, which opened as a second exhibition building on April 26, 1979. The impetus for the expansion came from Hans Mayr, the then president of the Wiener Künstlerhaus, who in 1977 had organized an exhibition for Vienna featuring works of contemporary art from the Peter and Irene Ludwig Collection in Aachen. During the exhibition the collector couple had agreed to loan the museum a group of works, whose negotiation and selection was led by an Austrian committee appointed by the then Federal Minister for Science and Research, Dr. Hertha Firnberg. By the time the exhibition had opened, however, the approximately one hundred loans under the preliminary contract had almost doubled. As with the 1977 exhibition, it too focused on works of Pop Art and Photorealism. In 1978 yet another addition to the museum’s holdings came, this time through the acquisition of Wolfgang Hahn’s collection in Cologne focusing on Nouveau Réalisme and Fluxus.
 

With the establishment of the Austrian Ludwig Foundation in 1981 (thanks to Hertha Firnberg and the Ludwigs) some two thirds of the earlier loans in the Ludwig Collection became the property of the foundation and were thus bound to the museum as permanent loans. In return, the Republic of Austria was obliged to make an annual, guaranteed payment to the foundation, which enabled it to make future acquisitions. In 1991 the Ludwigs endowed it with yet another large donation to mark the ten-year anniversary of its existence. In appreciation of this gift of important works, which came primarily from Eastern European countries, the former Minster of Science Erhard Busek effected a contract with the Austrian Ludwig Foundation in which the name Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien was finally constituted.
 

On September 15, 2001, the Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien was reopened in the MuseumsQuartier of Vienna’s historical center. Across 4,800 square meters, the new cubic building shrouded in basalt designed by the architects Ortner & Ortner provided space for monographic and thematic exhibitions with accompanying events and film screenings as well as changing presentations of the collection, which today comprises around 11,000 exhibits of art from modernity to the present day.