The Vienna Künstlerhaus (German: Künstlerhaus Wien) is an art exhibition building in Vienna. It is located on Karlsplatz near the Ringstraße, next to the Musikverein.
It was built between 1865 and 1868 by the Austrian Artists' Society (Gesellschaft bildender Künstler Österreichs, Künstlerhaus), the oldest surviving artists' society in Austria, and has served since then as an exhibition centre for painting, sculpture, architecture and applied art. Since 1947 it has also managed a cinema, which is used as one of the screening venues for the annual Viennale film festival.
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The society has its roots in the suburb of Laimgrube, now part of Mariahilf. Here, on the site of a guesthouse, Leopold Ernst had a Neo-Gothic festival hall built (at a great loss) in 1847.[1] The hall became the meeting place of the Society of Young Artists and Academics, which was founded in 1851 and later renamed the Albrecht Dürer Society.[2]
In 1861 it merged with another artists' society, Eintracht, to form a new association representing Viennese painters, sculptures and architects: the Vienna Artists' Society. In 1868 the society moved into its current premises. In 1897 a number of modern artists seceded from the Künstlerhaus and founded the Vienna Secession. In 1972 the society opened its membership to practitioners of applied art, and in 1976 it was renamed the "Austrian Artists' Society, Künstlerhaus". Since 1983 it has included filmmakers and audio-visual artists among its members. Its limited company (Künstlerhaus-Ges. m. b. H.), founded in 1985, organises exhibitions both for the Künstlerhaus and for other museums and institutions.[3]
The architect of the building was August Weber (1836–1903).[4] Several types of Austrian stone were used, supplied by the Viennese firm Anton Wasserburger. Emperor Franz Joseph I laid the keystone.[5]
Opened on 1 September 1868 – one of the earliest Ringstraße buildings – it was designed in the style of an Italian Renaissance villa, after Jacopo Sansovino, and initially stood on the banks of the Wien River, which still flowed openly at that time. It was significantly expanded as early as 1882, receiving a pair of side wings, which were later to house a cinema (from 1949) and a theatre (from 1974); also in 1882, it hosted the "First International Art Exhibition in the Künstlerhaus". The inner garden was given a roof in 1888.
In the 20th century it was speculated several times that the building, which was unusually low-rise for the Ringstraße area, was under pressure to be demolished or at least significantly rebuilt. For example, the "Kaym-Hetmanek Plan"[1][6] in the early 1930s proposed to replace the historic pavilion with eight-storey apartment blocks. The recommendations of an architectural planning competition for Karlsplatz in 1946 made it clear that the city of Vienna already saw the Künstlerhaus, as well as the Office of Transport building, as expendable. In 1956–57 the Stiftersaal room underwent significant modernisation.
Another noteworthy incident was Karl Schwanzer's plan, in 1966, to build offices for IBM on the site of the Künstlerhaus, which met with widespread disapproval among citizens and the media. The protests which had followed the decision to tear down the old Florianikirche the previous year[7] may have contributed to the rethinking of this plan. However, plans have again been recently discussed to expand and rebuild the Künstlerhaus, so as to integrate it more closely into the "museum cluster" on Karlsplatz. For example, the result of an architecture competition from 1999, which envisaged the addition of two new buildings, was proposed anew by the architect Beppo Mauhart in July 2010.[8]