The Museum of the Twentieth Century in Vienna During the 1960s

On September 20th, 1962, the Museum of the 20th Century, later known as mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, opened in Vienna. At the time the museum, soon known as the “20er Haus,” was the only art institution in Austria that focused exclusively on twentieth-century art. It was housed in a functional, modernist building, originally designed by Austrian architect Karl Schwanzer as a pavilion for the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels and subsequently slightly modified for its reconstruction in the Schweizergarten in Vienna.

During the early years, the museum’s exhibition and collection policy was significantly influenced by founding director Werner Hofmann, who was at its helm until he moved to Hamburger Kunsthalle in 1969. Three years before the new museum’s official opening, Hofmann had already begun building up an appropriate collection of modern art. These acquisitions and the exhibition history for his time as director (1962–1969) display a particularly striking focus on sculpture that was quite unusual at the time.

Hofmann organized large-scale overview exhibitions of sculpture such as Plastiken von Rodin bis heute (Sculpture from Rodin to the Present) (1966–1967) or Plastiken und Objekte (Sculptures and Objects) (1968), which directed attention to international developments in sculpture, and in addition regularly showed individual presentations of Austrian sculptors such as Fritz Wotruba (1963), Rudolf Hoflehner (1963), Wander Bertoni (1964) and Roland Goeschl (1969).

From today’s perspective, however, another aspect is particularly noticeable: the glaring absence of female artists – in both the exhibition history and the collections. All twenty-nine solo exhibitions under Hofmann’s aegis during his directorship concentrated solely on male artists. Works by female artists such as Lygia Clark, Marisol, Louise Nevelson and Germaine Richier likewise only appeared occasionally even in the large group exhibitions. During the Hofmann era, however, work by only seven female artists entered the collection.

An exhibition like Mapping the 60s cannot leave this state of affairs unquestioned. A collection is always an expression of the circumstances under which it was created. This can and must bring relevant shortcomings into focus, addressing how they arose, along with ongoing efforts to remedy them.

With this in mind, Mapping the 60s on the one hand draws on ephemera to explore the historical origins of the museum’s collection in the 1960s and the museum’s exhibition history during the era of founding director Werner Hofmann. Alongside an architectural model of Schwanzer’s “pavilion,” posters for exhibitions from that era are displayed, complete with the intertwined logo for the Museum of the Twentieth Century designed by Georg Schmid, while all the catalogs from this phase have been made available in digital form too, accompanied by a fully accessible acquisition list for purchases during this period. On the other hand, the exhibition focuses on the glaring gaps in the collection. The only originals shown are the handful of works from that era by female artists.

This first and foremost means the seven female artists whose work Hofmann purchased: Mathilde Flögl, Tess Jaray, Olga Jančić, Germaine Richier, Bridget Riley, Teresa Rudowicz and Sophie Taeuber-Arp. These are complemented by works from that period that have since entered the mumok collection thanks to the Austrian Ludwig Foundation’s support and that are little by little filling in some of the gaps in the existing inventory – pieces such as an early painterly work by performance pioneer Carolee Schneemann, which was acquired in 2013, but also works by female proponents of Pop Art, for instance Evelyne Axell, Sine Hansen, Jann Haworth or Kiki Kogelnik.