Kunsthistorisches Museum

The museum grew out of the collections of the Habsburgs, above all the portrait and armour collection of Ferdinand of Tyrol, the collection of Emperor Rudolf II, the greater part of which is now scattered, and the picture gallery of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm. In 1833 Joseph von Arneth, custodian and later director of the imperial coin and antiquities cabinet, called for all the imperial collections to be brought together in a single building.

Franz Joseph I decided at Christmas 1857 to pull down Vienna's walls, and the expansion that began in 1858 drew numerous designs for the Ringstraße zone. August Sicard von Sicardsburg and Eduard van der Nüll proposed two museum buildings hard against the Hofburg, to left and right of what is now the Heldenplatz; Ludwig Förster wanted them between Schwarzenbergplatz and the Stadtpark, and others put them at the Schottenring, near the Bellariastraße close to the site finally chosen, on the Opernring or at the Getreidemarkt. A competition in 1867 settled the present position, the emperor wanting the museums not too close to the Hofburg but on the far side of the Ringstraße.

Carl von Hasenauer entered that competition and persuaded Gottfried Semper, then working in Zurich, to join him. The two buildings were to be designed in the feeling of the Italian Renaissance, and the plans found favour with the imperial house. Semper was received by the emperor in April 1869 and given the commission by word of mouth; the written commission went to both architects in July 1870. What told in their favour over the projects of other architects was, among other things, Semper's vision of a great complex called the Kaiserforum, of which the museums would have formed one part. Semper died in 1879 and the Kaiserforum was never carried out in the planned form, though the two museums were built.

Work began without ceremony on 27 November 1871. Semper moved to Vienna, but there were serious personal differences between him and Hasenauer from the outset, and from 1877 Hasenauer had sole charge of the building. Scaffolding reached the roof storey and the raised ground floor was finished in 1874; the first windows went in during 1878; the attic and balustrade were completed in 1879, and the dome and tabernacles were built in 1880–1881. Statues of figures from the arts ring the attic, carved by Edmund Hellmer, Carl Kundmann, Viktor Tilgner, Caspar Zumbusch and others, and Johannes Benk's bronze Pallas Athene stands on the dome. Gustav Klimt, Ernst Klimt, Franz Matsch, Hans Makart and Mihály Munkácsy painted the staircase. A lighting and climate scheme with double-glazed ceilings let the building do without artificial light, at that date mostly gas, at the price of opening hours that changed with the season.

The arms collection, today the imperial hunting and armour collection, opened its doors on 3 November 1889, and the library began work on 1 January 1890. Franz Joseph opened the building as the imperial and royal Kunsthistorisches Museum on 17 October 1891, and it has been open to the public since 22 October of that year.

In 1891 the court museum was organised in seven collections under three directorates, covering coins, medals and antiquities, the Egyptian collection, arms and objects of the art industry, and the picture gallery with its restoration workshop. Gathering and arranging the rest of the imperial collections, brought in from the Lower and Upper Belvedere, the Hofburg and Schloss Ambras in Tyrol, took a further two years. The space the building offered was soon too tight: the finds from Ephesus were shown in the Theseus Temple in the Volksgarten, and rooms had to be rented in the Lower Belvedere. In 1914, after the assassination of the heir to the throne, Franz Ferdinand, his Este collection passed into the museum's administration; formed out of the art collection of the house of Este and what Franz Ferdinand had brought back from his voyage round the world, it had stood in the Neue Hofburg since 1908, and from it came the present collection of old musical instruments and the ethnology museum. Apart from the pressing economic conditions the First World War passed without loss, and the museum stayed regularly open to the public through all five years of it. Until 1919 it answered to the office of the Lord Chamberlain and belonged to the family trust of the house of Habsburg-Lorraine, its officials and staff part of the imperial household.

The change from monarchy to republic passed off inside the museum in complete calm. On 19 November 1918 the two court museums on Maria-Theresien-Platz were placed under the protection of the young Republic of German-Austria. The claims raised in the following weeks and months by the successor states of the monarchy, and by Italy and Belgium, threatened the museum's holdings: on 12 February 1919 armed Italian units removed 62 paintings by force, a theft that left a trauma among the museum's curators and art historians for a long time afterwards. Articles 195 and 196 of the Treaty of Saint-Germain of 10 September 1919 provided for cultural claims to be settled by negotiation, and the Belgian, Czechoslovak and renewed Italian claims were largely turned aside. Only Hungary, whose demands were by far the largest, was met, in 147 cases, after more than ten years of talks.

A law of 3 April 1919 expropriated the house of Habsburg-Lorraine and transferred its property, the collections of the imperial house among it, to the Republic. Administration passed on 18 June 1920 to the state office for the interior and education, and days afterwards the court museum was renamed the Kunsthistorisches Staatsmuseum Wien, and in 1921 simply the Kunsthistorisches Museum; from 1 January 1921 its staff became ordinary employees of the Republic. Hans Tietze drew up the Vienna Museum Programme in 1919, which set the city's museums to work closely together and gave each house its own focus, so that exchange, sale and adjustment governed acquisition between the wars and produced collecting tendencies that still hold. The arms collection moved from 1934 into the rooms it occupies today in the Neue Burg, where the collection of old musical instruments had stood since 1916.

With the Anschluss of Austria to the German Reich, all Jewish art collections, among them that of the Rothschilds, were forcibly aryanised. Collections were either called gifts or simply handed out to the museums by the Gestapo, and the holdings grew considerably as a result. The Kunsthistorisches Museum was not the only museum to profit from aryanisation: looted Jewish property was sold systematically to museums, collections and pawnshops throughout the Reich. Fritz Dworschak led the museum from 1938 to 1945, at first as commissarial head and from 1941 as first director; Alfred Stix, first director from 1934 to 1938, returned to the leadership in 1945.

After the Second World War the museum found it difficult, so far as it wanted to at all, to return the aryanised works to their owners or their heirs. The Rothschild family was compelled to leave the most important part of its own collection to the museum, a transfer called a dedication or a gift and justified by the export law, which did not permit owners to take certain works of art out of the country; similar methods were used on other former owners. Decades later, under international diplomatic and press pressure that came in large part from the United States, the federal government changed the law in the art restitution act of 1998, known as the Lex Rothschild, and the objects were returned to the Rothschilds.

On the basis of the federal act on the return of works of art of 4 December 1998 the museum carries out provenance research on a large scale. Work had already begun in the house on the initiative of the archive's director, Herbert Haupt, who in 1998, with Lydia Gröbl, produced a full account of the changes in the museum's inventory during the Nazi years and in the years up to the State Treaty of 1955. In 2010 an Austrian government panel recommended that the museum return two altar panels by the sixteenth-century Dutch painter Maerten van Heemskerck to the heirs of Richard Neumann, a Jewish art collector in Vienna plundered by the Nazis. In 2015 Poland presented evidence that Pieter Bruegel the Elder's The Fight Between Carnival and Lent had been seized during the German occupation by Charlotte von Wächter, wife of the Nazi governor of Kraków, Otto von Wächter; the museum held that it had owned the painting since the seventeenth century and that the work seized in 1939 was a different painting. Susanne Hehenberger and Monika Löscher worked as provenance researchers for the research commission from 1 April 2009 until March 2016, covering the period from 1933 onwards, and Löscher has held the post alone since 2016. Work on the theft of musical instruments under the regime began in 2015, and the report on the collection of old musical instruments, expected by the end of 2017, appeared in the summer of 2019.

On the initiative of the then general director Wilfried Seipel, the museum became on 1 January 1999 the first of the federal museums to be given full legal capacity, most of the others following in the years after, and since 11 June 1999 it has been constituted as a scientific institution of the federation under public law. Sabine Haag was general director from 2009 to 2024 alongside the commercial director Paul Frey; Eike Schmidt, who was to have taken over in November 2019, withdrew on 1 October that year, and Haag was reappointed for five years from the beginning of 2020. Jonathan Fine has led the museum since January 2025. It recorded around 1.95 million visitors in 2024.

The Kunsthistorisches Museum is the largest art museum in Austria, and with the Naturhistorisches Museum facing it, its sister building, it encloses Maria-Theresien-Platz, laid out over part of the former glacis, an ensemble that is a protected monument and part of the world heritage site of the historic centre of Vienna. Beyond the main building it takes in the collections in the Neue Burg, the Austrian theatre museum in the Palais Lobkowitz, the Weltmuseum Wien, the Theseus Temple, the imperial treasury in the Hofburg and the imperial carriage collection at Schönbrunn, with a branch at Schloss Ambras in Innsbruck.

Its twelve paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder make up the largest collection of the painter's work. Cellini's Saliera, made between 1539 and 1543, was stolen from the museum on 11 May 2003 during renovation work, in what was the greatest art theft in Austrian history, and was recovered on 21 January 2006 in a wood near Zwettl with the help of the convicted thief. Johannes Holzhausen's documentary The Great Museum, filmed over two years in the run-up to the reopening of the renovated Kunstkammer rooms in 2013, reached cinemas in September 2014. From October 2018 to January 2019 the museum staged Bruegel: Once in a Lifetime, the largest exhibition of the painter's work ever mounted.