Lentos Art Museum

The Lentos Art Museum stands on the banks of the Danube in Linz, Austria. Its long, low building of glass and steel was designed by the Zurich firm Weber & Hofer and opened in 2003. The transparent façade glows at night, marking the museum’s place between the Nibelungen Bridge and the Brucknerhaus. Inside, wide galleries and staircases guide visitors through modern spaces that let daylight in. The building itself is part of the city’s cultural quarter along the river. Its position on the waterfront makes it a landmark visible from both sides of the Danube. The museum holds a collection built from the Gurlitt bequest after the Second World War. Wolfgang Gurlitt’s holdings included works by Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka, Nolde, Corinth and Pechstein, forming the core of the city’s New Gallery. Since then the collection has grown to about 1,500 paintings, over 10,000 works on paper and 850 photographs. The displays trace modern art from the early 19th century to the present, with pieces by Valie Export, Man Ray and Andy Warhol. Changing exhibitions bring in loans from other museums to show contemporary trends. Visitors find a chronological walk through key movements and styles. Early rooms show works by Caspar David Friedrich and Johann Baptist Reiter. Classical modernism is represented by Schiele’s intense figures and Kokoschka’s expressive portraits. Later galleries include Pop Art, New Objectivity and sculpture by Eduardo Chillida and Tony Cragg. The museum also confronts its Gurlitt inheritance through provenance research and restitutions. Outside, the river and city form a changing backdrop to the glass building’s reflections.