The Albertina Museum

the long version

The Albertina Museum in Vienna holds one of the oldest graphic art collections in the world and also ranks as one of the city's most important museums, with its collection of over a million works covering six centuries. It is named after its founder, Duke Albert of Saxe-Teschen, who owned significant drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael, as well as famous works by Albrecht Dürer. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the museum's holdings were augmented by purchases and gifts of exceptional Dutch and French art, and key works by Gustav Klimt, Egon Sciele and Oskar Kokoschka. The Albertina Museum's collection continues to be maintained and enhanced today with the acquisition of works by artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jackson Pollock. In autumn 2007 one of the most prominent private collections of classical modernist art in Europe - the Batliner collection - was added to the Albertina Museum as a long-term loan. It is now a cornerstone of the museum's collection, which, with more than 500 works from Monet, Cézanne and Picasso to Miró, Chagall and Malevich, as well as Klee, Bacon, Kiefer and Baselitz, provides a concise overview of modernist painting of the twentieth century.