The Foundation

On February 21, 1978, the Ludwigs signed a contract in which they agreed to lend approximately 130 artworks to the Austrian state over a period of five years. Some of the works were exhibited at the Museum of the Twentieth Century in the Schweizergarten, while others were shown in the baroque Palais Liechtenstein, which had been specially adapted for this purpose.

The Austrian Ludwig Foundation was established on January 19, 1981, which involved the donation of 128 artworks from the Ludwig collection; in return, the Republic of Austria committed to annual financial contributions to the Austrian Ludwig Foundation for a period of fifteen years. The Foundation also received around twenty artworks from an anonymous donor, and gifts from a number of Austria-based artists.

To mark the tenth anniversary of the Austrian Ludwig Foundation, the ownership of a further 100 artworks was transferred from the Ludwigs to the Foundation, and the Republic of Austria agreed to extend its annual financial contributions for an additional fifteen years, up to 2010. The Palais Liechtenstein and the Museum of the Twentieth Century were merged to become mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien.

As of 2001, with the establishment of a new museum building in Vienna’s MuseumsQuartier, about half of the collection’s holdings are now gathered in one place, on permanent loan to mumok. Vienna’s Albertina also holds a substantial part of the collection. Other items from the collection which are on permanent loan can be found in Vienna at the MAK – Museum of Applied Arts, in the Belvedere and the University of Applied Arts, as well as in federal state collections at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, the Neue Galerie Graz, the Tyrolean State Museum Ferdinandeum in Innsbruck, the Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz, and the Museum der Moderne Salzburg.

From 1981 to Today: A Contemporary Art Collection

When the Austrian Ludwig Foundation was established in 1981 with a particular focus on international contemporary art, the artistic practices of the 1960s and 1970s were seen as most current developments and formed the core of the collection. The works donated by the Ludwigs from these two decades are characterized by a focus on more traditional artistic media such as painting, printmaking, and sculpture; meanwhile, from the late 1960s on, artists were beginning to claim the body as material for performance pieces, and were increasingly working with film, video, and other new technologies.

From the very start, new acquisitions supplemented the existing collection of works from the 1960s and 1970s in order to account for the huge breadth of artistic developments during the period. For example, 1983 saw the purchase of the estate of the Viennese Actionist Rudolf Schwarzkogler—mainly consisting of photographic documentation of his “Actions.” In the 1990s, a set of Dieter Roth’s works on paper was acquired, as well as a more international collection of Fluxus works featuring pieces by George Brecht, Robert Filliou, Yoko Ono, and others. The beginning of that decade also saw the acquisition of photographic documentation and objects related to Carolee Schneemann’s body performances, paving the way for the collection to later be expanded to include works by women artists from the 1960s and 1970s. Thus, in the 2010s, the Pop Art holdings were bolstered by the acquisition of works by Sine Hansen and Jann Haworth; Rosemarie Castoro’s large-scale sculptures expanded the collection’s Minimal art holdings; and the addition of works by Renate Bertlmann and Birgit Jürgenssen allowed for developments in Austria’s feminist art to be juxtaposed with the collection’s holdings related to Viennese Actionism. The collection’s initial holdings from Eastern and Central Europe were bolstered by regime-critical works from the 1960s to 1980s by artists such as Július Koller and Sanja Iveković.

Over the decades, acquisitions have also always made reference to significant developments in contemporary art: from Günther Förg and Albert Oehlen in the 1980s to Mike Kelley and Stephen Prina in the 1990s, and to Stan Douglas, Omer Fast, and William Kentridge in the 2000s. The Austrian Ludwig Foundation’s collection now includes various Post-Conceptual practices as well as an increasing amount of photography and moving image works. In designating pieces for potential acquisition, special attention is paid to expanding the collection to include works of contemporary art from non-Western contexts and to incorporating works by contemporary female and queer artists—in particular works that reflect on gender. It is with this outlook to the future that works by artists including Leilah Babirye, Anna Boghiguian, Serge Attukwei Clottey, Sonia Gomes, and Moffat Takadiwa joined the collection in the 2010s and 2020s.