Exhibition
March 11, 2025 – February 13, 2026
Dream-like fantasies, bizarre impressions and glowing gazes, grotesque caricatures, naive nature pieces, and visions of a self that is enraptured by the world. Arnold Schönberg explored the mysteries of his existence in sounds, in words, in paintings and drawings. Self-portrait and impression, elementarily drawn visage and demonic head of Christ, ghostly hand and blood red, palette gunge and the color gold – Schönberg’s imagination dictated his unconditional expression, uncompromising about artistic logic.
Wassily Kandinsky exhibited Schönberg’s paintings. August Macke flew into a rage when he set eyes on them. Carl Moll advised the scandal-stricken composer not to exhibit his artwork in public. Music critic Elsa Bienenfeld recognized “ascending dream-like fantasies” in the paintings, and identified their “brutal simplicity.” Schönberg was described by Albert Paris Gütersloh to be leading “limp-wristed painting through the ice-cold eye of logic.” And observations in the press ranged from “attempts at masterful artistry” through to “dilettantish nonsense.” Was Schönberg a “color fantast,” “color symphonist,” or even somebody who “roams about in primeval cosmic space”?
In this exhibition, Schönberg’s evocative work is contextualized by paintings and drawings, music manuscripts, writings, letters, photographs and objects from the atelier. Contemporaries from the fine arts engage in a written dialog with the composer in his orbit as a painter. Digitally animated scores, film clips and voices from the past take visitors on a journey into an only ostensibly lost world.
I have often called my pictures “painted music.” Or I have talked about “making music with colors and shapes.” That is to say, with a tension kindred to creating themes, developing motifs and placing these in relation to each other.
Arnold Schönberg, 1930
I should most like to call Schönberg’s art the painting of essence.
Wassily Kandinsky, 1912
In fact, painting was to me the same as making music. It was to me a way of expressing myself, of presenting emotions, ideas, and other feelings.
Arnold Schönberg, 1949
Curator: Therese Muxeneder
Architecture: Jochen Koppensteiner
Digital realisation: Christoph Edtmayr
Opening Hours
Monday–Friday 10 am to 5 pm
closed on legal holidays and on April 18, December 24 and 31, 2025
Entrance fees
Adults € 6; Discount: senior citizens, visitors with special needs, groups, Vienna City Card
Free admission
children and young people 26 and under
Press photos
