Mumok

Mumok - the Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien - opened in its present building in 2001, a windowless block clad in dark grey basalt lava with a barrel-vaulted roof, deliberately closed against the baroque courtyard around it, with the galleries stacked over several floors above and below ground. The collection runs to around ten thousand works covering the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: pop art and nouveau réalisme from the Ludwig donation, Fluxus, minimal and conceptual art, and above all one of the most comprehensive museum holdings of Viennese Actionism - Nitsch, Brus, Muehl and Schwarzkogler, whose performance work of the 1960s was violent, transgressive and prosecuted at the time, and which the museum shows with its documentation rather than sanitising it.

History

The museum was founded on 21 September 1962 as the Museum of the Twentieth Century, in the Swiss Garden, inside the Austrian Pavilion that Karl Schwanzer had built for Expo 58 in Brussels, and its founding director Werner Hofmann quickly bought major works of classical modernism. On 26 April 1979 it opened a second building in the Palais Liechtenstein in Alsergrund, thanks to Hans Mayr of the Künstlerhaus, whose exhibition from the Aachen collection of Peter and Irene Ludwig in 1977 led the Ludwigs to lend and in 1981 give works to Vienna, and since 2001 the museum has been housed in its stone-clad building by Ortner & Ortner in the Museumsquartier (Wikipedia, Mumok).

What to look for

• A windowless basalt block - the building closed against the courtyard around it.
• A deep Actionism holding - Viennese performance work of the 1960s with its record.
• Pop and nouveau réalisme - the core of the Ludwig donation.
• Fluxus, minimal and conceptual work - the later twentieth-century collection.

When to go

All year. Half a day.

Good to know

Viennese Actionism involves blood, bodies and material many visitors find genuinely distressing - the museum warns, but it is on open display. Hangings rotate, so a specific work may not be up.

Nearby

The Leopold Museum is in the same courtyard; the Kunsthalle adjoins.

Key facts