What this is

Moe Vienna is an independent publication about the art held in one city. It is organised the way a collection is organised — by what is there, why it is there, and how to stand in front of it — and it is written for people who intend to look properly rather than tick things off.

What you will find here

Twenty-seven pieces across five sections: the great collections and how each one came to exist; the break of Vienna 1900 and what it looked like in paint, on walls and in objects; the small houses, where the rooms are stranger and more revealing; provenance, handled plainly; and a set of pieces about the mechanics of looking itself.

What you will not

No opening hours, no ticket prices, no admission rules and no exhibition dates. All of it expires, and a site that carries expiring information becomes wrong faster than it becomes useful. Check the institution before you go; that is what its website is for.

We also do not tell you which wall a work is on. Hangs are rearranged, works travel, and paper-based collections rotate constantly by physical necessity. Treat any specific wall as a rumour.

On provenance

Several pieces here deal with how works entered Vienna's collections, including seizures after 1938 and the restitutions that followed. Those pieces state what is established and say plainly where a matter is contested or unresolved. Nothing on this site asserts a disputed history as settled, and nothing here is a legal record.

Who writes it

Pieces are written and edited by the Moe Vienna desk. The site takes support from the patrons named on the homepage; none of them sees a piece before it goes up, and none of them has any say in what it says.

Pictures

Photographs are credited under each plate. Where a work is by an artist dead more than a century, the work itself is public domain; the photograph of it may not be, and is credited accordingly.