Hans-Jürgen Hafner: You took over as general director of the ALBERTINA Museum at the beginning of 2025 with your own annual program, which has met, at times, with an enthusiastic critical response. But before we get into that, let’s talk first about the museum in general. What kind of museum is the ALBERTINA today?

Ralph Gleis: Once a cabinet of prints and drawings, the ALBERTINA has become a universal art museum, with wide collections of more than 1.2 million objects – not only drawings, but photography, paintings, sculptures, and installations – spanning six hundred years of art history, from the Gothic period to the present. In our exhibition program, however, we have taken a very strong turn towards the contemporary, which we definitely intend to continue. Internationally speaking, we are one of the few museums that brings together exhibitions from very different eras concurrently, under one roof.

The museum has enormous potential that still needs to be realized. Through innovative approaches, we want to rethink the ALBERTINA together, to make art a new experience, and to network the institution internationally. Art is always a mirror of society: I want our exhibitions to discuss current issues and arouse people’s curiosity. But above all, our exhibitions should be enjoyable: We want to rediscover art together.

HJH: But that turn towards the contemporary is, also quite a recent development, and doesn’t have much to do with the ALBERTINA’s roles as a historical museum and as a treasure trove of world-class graphic art.

RG: Many people also tend to say they find contemporary art inaccessible. In my opinion, there is no such duality between old and contemporary art. Good art is timeless, and all art needs a good way of being explained, in order to make it accessible to everyone.

I see our diversity as a unique feature: Admirers of contemporary art come into contact here with the Old Masters; or, conversely, visitors to our current exhibition on Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer are confronted with artists they’ve never heard of and who are being shown for the first time in Austria, such as Matthew Wong or Jenny Saville. But you’re basically right: While the museum can look back on 250 years of history, it’s only since the turn of the millennium that it has added collections in the fields of photography, 20th-century painting and sculpture, architecture, and contemporary art – that is, that the ALBERTINA has become an interdisciplinary art museum.

View of “Leonardo – Dürer,” ALBERTINA, Vienna, 2025. © ALBERTINA, Vienna. Photo: Ana Paula Franco

HJH: What does the universal art museum have to do with the Viennese brand that the ALBERTINA has so successfully become these last ten or twenty years?

RG: The process started even earlier than that, though the ALBERTINA’s profile has certainly changed again in the interim, to become a museum with global appeal. Irrespective of its recent history, that process is still very much in line with the ALBERTINA’s core brand, as one of the world’s leading collections of graphic art. We are part of a very illustrious circle, together with the Louvre, the British Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum, of major collections with significant holdings of drawings, prints, and works on paper. But our historical collection of drawings was once contemporary, too – and we are continuing the history of the collection and expanding it with contemporary drawings as well.

The recent increase in attention, though, has to do with our exhibitions on classical modernism, 20th-century art, and contemporary art. After all, there are other time-honored collections of graphic art that do not enjoy such prominence these days. It’s this mixture that makes us so special, and it’s what attracted me to this position.

View of “Matthew Wong - Vincent van Gogh. Painting as a Last Resort,” ALBERTINA, Vienna, 2025.© ALBERTINA, Vienna. Photo: Ana Paula Franco

HJH: As a genre, the graphic arts are more for connoisseurs than for a wider public. At the same time, works on paper place very special demands on conservation and how they’re exhibited. So, has the museum’s repositioning, while successful, nevertheless pushed its core function – to be a special museum for an art form that, because it’s a particularly sensitive medium, and thus regrettably underrepresented – into the background?

RG: Absolutely not. Until the turn of the millennium, the ALBERTINA’s art gallery only held two or three exhibitions per year. Whereas in the last quarter century, there have been many more drawing exhibitions here than in the preceding one hundred years put together. As you began with, I was already responsible for the 2025 program, and made a very conscious decision in setting its course, as I intend to make our core competence visible. Our major spring exhibition highlights da Vinci and Dürer, the greatest masters of the Renaissance, and draws directly on our core holdings, including works by Raphael, Titian, and Martin Schongauer. In addition to one hundred of our own works, there are fifty or so loans from the collections I just mentioned, as well as from the Uffizi, Windsor Castle, and so on – it’s the largest showing of Leonardo in the German-speaking world to date!

Later this year, the exhibition “The Fascination of Paper” will offer a kind of tour of the collection to illustrate what art on paper is all about today, albeit linked with historical perspectives: where it actually comes from, how the genre has developed, and how this can be shown in an exhibition that ranges from Titian to Anselm Kiefer. In short, we’re taking a fresh look at the medium – and not as a contrast to the rest of art. It’s not tenable to unilaterally advocate for the Old Masters and graphic arts while supposing art on paper is no longer relevant.

View of “True Colors,” ALBERTINA, Vienna, 2025. © ALBERTINA, Vienna. Photo: Daniel Antalfi

HJH: I think that strengthening the museum’s core identity, especially the specific collection expertise that it embodies, is a really important task – and one whose fulfillment is probably rewarded by the public.

RG: Across time, collecting art has always been the same as collecting contemporary art, which is why I see the coexistence of these two functions as consistent rather than antagonistic. We keep going back to the so-called “Old Masters” because that’s what we hold in our collection. It also helps us reach an audience that has long been missing such exhibitions.

At the same time, we are a truly contemporary art museum and, if you want to break it down by segment, both one of Austria’s most successful such museums and one of its most important exhibition venues for photography. The ALBERTINA has always had some very interesting photo shows, like last year’s Gregory Crewdson retrospective, or “True Colors,” a collection-focused exhibition on the history of color in photography. We also have solo exhibitions by photographers such as Francesca Woodman, Jitka Hanzlová, and Lisette Model, who are among the “rediscovered” female artists we have in focus this year.

Hans Baldung gen. Grien, The Witches‘ Sabbath, 1514, pen and brush and black ink, white body-color, on red-brown prepared paper, 28.8 x 20.5 cm. Photo: ALBERTINA, Vienna

Albrecht Dürer, Praying Hands, 1508, brush in black and gray ink and white bodycolor, on blue prepared paper, 29.1 x 19.7 cm. Photo: ALBERTINA, Vienna

Upper Rhenish master, Model Sheet with the Symbols of the Four Evangelists, Animals, and a Wild Man, c. 1430–40, brush and white bodycolor, on black prepared paper, 20.9 x 14.3 cm. © Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main

Raphael, Study for the Bridgewater Madonna (recto), c. 1506–07, Metalpoint and pen on browm primed paper, 26.2 x 19.3 cm. Photo: ALBERTINA, Vienna

HJH: But the demands on a contemporary art museum are quite different from those on a multi-disciplinary museum whose main focus is graphic art. Modern art raises the problem of the dissolution of boundaries between the arts, their decoupling from different media. At the same time, art has become much more discursive and exhibitionary, which your museum’s education program needs to reflect.

Technically speaking, the ALBERTINA’s core holdings – that is, its works on paper – require a very departmentalized approach, also from the standpoint of conservation. The exhibition runtimes and the frequency with which they can be publicly shown are quite different from those of paintings, for instance, which allow for permanent presentations.

RG: I believe that we’ve moved beyond that and now view the collection in more contemporary terms; visitors, too, perceive the museum differently. Of course, there are no boundaries left today. But that often becomes too theoretical a discourse: Leonardo worked in all of the media available to him, just like the artists of the 19th century were already engaged in photography. We now have a presentation of work by Damien Hirst, where we are showing his drawings in a museum exhibition for the first time worldwide; visitors can even get creative with the artist’s own drawing machine.

Besides our extensive collection of prints, we have three hundred thousand other objects in our holdings, which have their own very particular exhibition requirements. Meaning, that our restoration facilities and the management of our depots are geared towards all types of art.

Damien Hirst, Away from the Flock, 1994, pencil on paper, 50 x 73 cm. © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved/ Bildrecht, Vienna 2025. Photo: Stephen White

HJH: That would be my follow-up question – how things stand with conservation and restoration, considering that painting, photography, and other media each pose very specific requirements from a conservation standpoint, whereas the public primarily sees the curatorial side – the temporary, thematic exhibitions.

RG: Exactly. We have the curatorial department, and then we have the various collections, such as the graphic collection and the holdings of Old Masters. Painting and sculpture are combined in the 20th-century section, and there are separate departments for architecture and photography, each with their own restoration, storage, and administration divisions.

The history of museums is often shaped less by long-term strategies than by historical coincidences – as with the addition of the Essl Collection. Both in terms of content and conservation, it’s a vast field.

HJH: At the same time, I noticed during my tours today that the various exhibitions are, essentially, “pure” in the sense of media or genre. They’re also a somewhat conservative bias in favor of visual art – there were no performative and conceptual approaches in sight

RG: Yes and no. We don’t have a conservative bias at all, nor does our audience perceive it that way. I’d rather put it like this: Our program is about presenting good art with good stories, in order to reflect the questions we are asking of art today.

HJH: The history of the ALBERTINA – exemplified by your predecessors, like Otto Benesch or Walter Koschatzky – is tied to major art-historical achievements that were exemplified using the supposedly “minor” genre of the graphic arts. At the moment, it seems that the museum’s frontline is very much its public exhibitions, while the scholarly, conservational, and research work is pushed behind the scenes. In that sense, isn’t the ALBERTINA coming to resemble a Kunsthalle?

RG: In my vision of the ALBERTINA’s future, we’re aiming to bring all aspects of museum work into greater balance. You are correct in saying that the museum’s function is about educating as much as it is about exhibiting. But it’s also about the collections – about expanding, maintaining, and preserving them, which are the fundamental categories of museum work. Research, meanwhile, remains the foundation for many of these areas, and while it has traditionally been framed in terms of the collection, you can also apply it to restoration. For me, they’re one and the same task.

Art mediation is also very important to me: We have to appeal with what we have to different groups of people. We operate on a “kids first” principle; meaning, that children and families are the first to see the exhibitions. There are also accessible options for deaf and blind visitors, as well as tours guided by people with Down syndrome.

In this way, we clearly distinguish ourselves from Kunsthallen, which produce one exhibition after another. Our collections oblige us to simultaneously preserve this cultural heritage and to draw from it – and we do this always with a contemporary perspective. It’s not about pitting scholarship against popularity. They are two sides of the same coin, especially because we must never underestimate our audience. People want to know things, and if I don’t have content and research, I can’t educate them whatsoever. The days when one could say, “I’m presenting a painting and leaving the audience to their personal judgments,” are probably over.

HJH: Let’s stay with the relationship between popularity and scholarship. Anyone who wants to reach their audience through exhibition programming always runs the risk of focusing mainly on big names. Of late, ALBERTINA has shown Erwin Wurm, Gerhard Richter, Katharina Grosse …

RG: Since I assumed my post, I’ve had conversations with many highly renowned artists who would love to exhibit here – I find that entirely legitimate, and the ALBERTINA’s reputation helps us immensely in that respect. It also helps to excite a large audience, because of the very fact that we present different kinds of exhibitions simultaneously. Our first solo retrospective is of the wonderful Brigitte Kowanz, who, as they so nicely say in Austria, is ein Weltstar in Wien (world-famous in Vienna), but is still not very well known elsewhere. It’s important to me that we consider how we approach Austrian artists and how we can internationalize them – in Kowanz’s case, we’re trying to organize a second stop abroad for her show. At the same time, there is also a demand for already well-known international artists to reflect on the ALBERTINA’s own art, and we are showing five such artists this year for the first time in Austria. In this context, it’s about names, yes, but really – and you can see that this is what really fascinates me – it’s about themes. I love curating exhibitions that focus on specific questions, which is why I don’t rule out any exhibition with big names, as long as there’s a thesis behind it.

Joseph Beuys, Dürer, ich führe persönlich Baader + Meinhof durch die Dokumenta V (Dürer, I will personally guide Baader + Meinhof through Documenta V), 1972. Installation view, “Remix – from Gerhard Richter to Katharina Grosse,” ALBERTINA, Vienna, 2025

HJH: I’ll pick up on the keyword “departments” again. During my tour, the Schausammlung Batliner struck me as quite “departmentalized.” It was almost endearingly anachronistic how it lays out a path through the “great” epochs of modern art – even as individuals are free to collect whatever they wish. But the image of modern art that is being publicly presented here is reduced to specific media and a few prominent names.

RG: I must disagree with you, of course. I have extensively studied 19th and early 20th-century art. My area of research was the Secessions [of Berlin, Munich, and Vienna], which were crucial to the formation of international networks among the artists involved. But when it came to collecting, Vienna forgot all about internationalism; in reality, it was almost exclusively the local heroes – Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, later Oskar Kokoschka – who were collected for museums. Impressionism, meanwhile, was not welcome in Vienna, and Expressionism had its own difficult start here. And this is where the Schausammlung Batliner really stands out, offering something that neither ALBERTINA nor the rest of the Vienna museum landscape has in this quantity and quality.

Brigitte Kowanz, 1x8, 1988, fluorescent lamps, fluorescent paint, glass, wood, 150 x 150 x 15 cm. © Estate Brigitte Kowanz / Bildrecht, Vienna 2025. Photo: ALBERTINA

Francesca Woodman, #1 or House #1 or Abandoned House, 1976, 14.5 x 14.8 cm, posthumous silver gelatine print, 2005.

HJH: What are the most urgent to-dos with respect to decolonizing ALBERTINA’s collection or its exhibition and educational work?

RG: In the background, we’ve already initiated quite a few cross-cutting tasks that will only become visible in the coming years. For instance, we realize that a museum with such large graphic holdings requires a different kind of accessibility. Today, visitors usually prepare on their phones before attending an exhibition. They want to know more about what the museum is and what it offers, which means the collection needs to be available online.

We’re also thinking of the museum as having multiple dimensions. The ideal is a “museum without walls” – one that can reach people who can’t travel, who are immobile, or who use the museum in a different way. That means we’re thinking of the museum in broader terms than as just a physical place, and that we’re aiming for a different kind of networked access.

These are, of course, future-oriented topics that we can’t tick off in just one or two years. The same goes for our three locations – we aim to develop a stronger profile for each one. What do you experience at the main location, here in the Palais [Erzherzog Albrecht]? What does ALBERTINA Modern offer? And what does ALBERTINA Klosterneuburg stand for? For the latter, we’re planning to focus more on site-specific work, as it’s essentially a kind of Schaudepot [a storage facility open to public viewing].

View of ALBERTINA KLOSTERNEUBURG, Vienna. Photo: Rupert Steiner

HJH: With so many objects in museum storage, not every piece can actually see the light of the public, and maybe not every item’s art-historical value is equally ironclad. But “de-collecting” – a buzzword one hears as a way to get a handle on sprawling collections – isn’t on the table, I gather?

RG: That’s a topic that only marginally aligns with the classical concept of the museum and its mission. The core responsibility is to collect and preserve, and in that sense, our ethos is quite different from that of museums in the US, where this issue comes up more often. If you look at the history of de-collecting, you quickly see that certain decisions were made that, in retrospect, are now seen as mistakes – because works were removed on the basis of zeitgeist that have since come to be highly valued. A museum operates according to its mandate: to preserve and research collections, to conserve them, and to expand them according to thoughtful criteria. So, the real question, as you rightly mentioned in terms of the future, is one of collection strategy: What do we acquire, knowing it will remain in the collection?

HJH: Will the temporary exhibition remain the favorite weapon of art education?

RG: Yes, the temporary exhibition and the special exhibition, which are naturally well-suited to focusing on our collections. That doesn’t mean I’m proclaiming the death of the permanent exhibition. But there is certainly a shift in this respect.

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