Best Museums in Vienna for Klimt, Schiele and Modernism

Vienna’s Modernist collections are split across four buildings and a set of streets: the Leopold Museum holds the world’s largest Egon Schiele collection, the Upper Belvedere holds Klimt’s The Kiss, the Kunsthistorisches Museum holds the young Klimt’s staircase paintings, and the Secession holds his Beethoven Frieze. Otto Wagner’s buildings are not in a museum at all; they are the city you walk through. Here is what each one costs, when it is closed, and how to see them in the right order.

Tip: If you are visiting several Vienna museums and attractions, look at the Vienna Pass, which covers free entry to a long list of them plus public transport. Check what is included and buy your card here.

Which Vienna museum should you visit for Klimt and Schiele?

Go to the Leopold Museum for Schiele and the Upper Belvedere for Klimt, and add the Secession if you want the Beethoven Frieze. Those three cover the Modernism most visitors come to Vienna for, and they are the three to book first if your time is short.

A quick guide to who holds what is below.

1. Leopold Museum: Egon Schiele. The largest collection of his work anywhere, alongside Klimt, Kokoschka, Loos and Wagner. Closed Tuesdays.
2. Upper Belvedere: Gustav Klimt. The Kiss, plus the largest collection of Klimt paintings in the world and Austrian art from the Middle Ages onwards. Open daily.
3. Secession: the Beethoven Frieze. Klimt’s 1902 wall painting, permanently on display in the building the Secessionists built for themselves. Closed Mondays.
4. Kunsthistorisches Museum: the young Klimt. The staircase paintings he made before he became a Secessionist, plus the Habsburg collections. Closed Mondays.
5. Sigmund Freud Museum: Berggasse 19. Not a Modernist art museum, but the rooms where psychoanalysis was developed, and inseparable from the same decades.

Who were the four artists of Viennese Modernism?

Viennese Modernism is usually told through four men who all died in 1918: the painters Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, the architect Otto Wagner and the designer Koloman Moser. Vienna marked the centenary of those four deaths with a city-wide programme of exhibitions, and the collections that programme drew on are permanent.

Gustav Klimt

Gustav Klimt was born in Vienna in July 1862 and became the founding president of the Vienna Secession. He started out making decorative paintings and moved into portraiture as his work developed, becoming the portrait painter of choice for wealthy Viennese society around 1900.

His most consequential act was not a painting. In 1897 he and a group of other artists quit the conservative Künstlerhaus and founded the Secession, an association of painters, sculptors and architects who wanted out of academic art and into their own styles.

The motto on the building they built reads Der Zeit ihre Kunst. Der Kunst ihre Freiheit: to every age its art, to art its freedom.

Egon Schiele

Egon Schiele was born in Tulln an der Donau in Lower Austria in June 1890 and brought expressionism, and stark, twisted depictions of the human body, into Viennese art. He moved into his own Vienna studio at 17 and met Klimt soon afterwards.

He was drawn to the older artist’s attitude to art and freedom of expression, and Klimt gave him opportunities to show his work across the city. That friendship shaped Schiele’s career.

Schiele attracted attention and scandal for his nudes of young models. Seeing the work now, you realise how thin the line he was walking was. He was imprisoned briefly after being falsely accused of abducting a young woman, served three days, and afterwards turned towards portraits of more conventional sitters, where Klimt’s influence shows again.

Shortly before his death in 1918 he had a career high at the 49th Secession exhibition, where almost all 50 of his displayed paintings and drawings sold. His most famous works, including Portrait of Wally and Self-Portrait with Physalis, are at the Leopold Museum.

Otto Wagner

Otto Wagner was born in Vienna in July 1841 and his buildings are still in daily use, which is the point of him. He was a teacher, a student, an urban planner, an architect and a designer, and he was the first in Vienna to step away from historicist architecture towards combining function with modern materials.

He self-published volumes of his designs and sketches through his career, in 1890, 1897, 1906 and 1922. Several of his winning competition designs were never built.

His most famous works are the Stadtbahn city railway, the Postsparkasse post office savings bank and the church at Steinhof, and all three can still be visited.

Koloman Moser

Koloman Moser was born in Vienna in March 1868, studied and then lectured in graphic design at the Kunstgewerbeschule, joined the Secession and went on to co-found the Wiener Werkstätte. He worked across stamps, textiles, furniture and jewellery, and took up painting later in his career.

His approach was new industrial materials with craftsmanship kept at the centre: no mass production, but modern design, function and flow in every piece.

1. The Leopold Museum

The Leopold Museum in the MuseumsQuartier holds the largest collection of Egon Schiele’s work in the world, 41 paintings and 188 works on paper, plus manuscripts. It is named after the ophthalmologist Rudolf Leopold, who bought his first Schiele in 1950 as a student and went on to collect 5,266 works by 19th-century and Modernist Austrian artists.

Leopold sold the collection to the Austrian state for €160 million, well below what the individual works were valued at, and that sale founded the museum, which opened in 2001. The white limestone building is now one of the anchors of the MuseumsQuartier.

Alongside Schiele you get Oskar Kokoschka, Gustav Klimt, Adolf Loos and Otto Wagner, in a permanent collection supplemented by changing thematic exhibitions.

I had known Schiele only by name before this trip and came home a convert. I am not going to attempt an interpretation I have no background for, so I will just say that the work spoke to me. It is dark, and it felt honest.

Practical information

Museumsplatz 1, 1070 Vienna. Open daily except Tuesday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., including public holidays. Closed Tuesdays.

Admission is €19 ($20, £16) for adults and €16 ($17, £14) reduced, with under-19s at €2.50 and under-7s free. A Vienna City Card gets you in for €17. There are combination tickets with the Kunsthistorisches Museum (€37), the MAK (€34), mumok (€33) and the Sigmund Freud Museum (€30).

The Leopold is free with the Vienna Pass, or you can book a skip-the-line ticket here.

2. The Kunsthistorisches Museum

The Kunsthistorisches Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, opened in 1891 to hold the art the Habsburgs had accumulated, and it runs from Ancient Egypt through Greek and Roman antiquity to medieval, Renaissance and Baroque painting. For Modernism, you come here for one thing: the Klimt paintings on the grand staircase.

Before Klimt founded the Secession he was a successful Jugendstil decorator, and one of his most important early commissions was to decorate that staircase. He did not do it alone: he worked in a collective with his younger brother Ernst and their school friend Franz Matsch, and they took the job over from three earlier artists who could not finish it, two because they died and one because he took other work.

Normally you view the paintings from 12 m (39 ft) below. For the Modernism centenary the museum built a temporary bridge so visitors could get close to them, which has since been removed. The paintings themselves are part of the building and are there whenever the museum is open.

I only came here for the staircase and a coffee in the museum café, which is worth the detour on its own.

Practical information

Burgring 5, 1010 Vienna. Open daily except Monday, with a late opening on Thursdays.

Admission is €22 ($24, £19) booked online and €24 ($26, £20) at the door, reduced €19 online and €20 on site, €23 with a Vienna City Card, and free for under-19s.

Book a time slot. From 8 September 2026 the Kunsthistorisches admits visitors only during reserved time slots, and the museum recommends booking in advance through its own shop. There is no time limit on your visit once you are in, and tickets bought before 8 September remain usable flexibly. The museum also warns about counterfeit tickets from lookalike sites, so buy from an official seller.

It is free with the Vienna Pass, and you can also buy a combination ticket for the Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Imperial Treasury.

3. The Sigmund Freud Museum and a Modernism walking tour

The Sigmund Freud Museum is at Berggasse 19, the building where Freud lived and worked for 47 years until he fled to London in 1938, and the museum runs a tour that places him in the wider context of Viennese science and society. Freud is not one of the four Modernists, and he cannot be separated from them either.

The museum was founded in 1971 and was renovated and expanded in 2020. It now shows all the family’s private rooms as well as Sigmund and Anna Freud’s consulting rooms, with permanent exhibitions on the development of psychoanalysis, the family’s life and the history of the house, plus a collection of conceptual art and changing special exhibitions.

The tour starts at the museum and then goes out into the Ninth District, to the places where Freud studied, saw patients, met friends and compared notes: the mansion houses and coffeehouses on the Ringstrasse, the University of Vienna and the former site of the Vienna General Hospital.

The full tour runs three to four hours and goes deep. A shorter, more general version is available on request, and that is what we took. The hour and a half was enough to understand how Freud developed as a scientist, what pushed him towards psychoanalysis and where he sat in the academic and social world of his time.

Our guide had designed the tour herself and it showed. You need no background in psychology to enjoy it, because Freud’s biography comes interwoven with stories about Vienna and the other people in it.

Practical information

Berggasse 19, 1090 Vienna. Check the museum’s own site for current opening times and ticket prices before you go.

The tour is booked individually by emailing museum[at]freud-museum.at and includes museum entry. There is a combination ticket with the Leopold Museum at €30.

4. The Vienna Secession

The Secession is the building the Secessionists built for themselves in 1898, and it still functions as what its own material calls the oldest independent exhibition space dedicated to contemporary art. Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze is permanently on display in the basement.

Joseph Maria Olbrich designed it after the city made a site available on the Wienzeile near the Naschmarkt, and the leaf-work dome, known to Vienna as the golden cabbage, became the movement’s symbol. The building caused a considerable fuss among a population that did not much care for it.

The facade carries the same motto as the movement, to every age its art, to art its freedom, and the programme still follows it: the Secession shows international exhibitions that test the edges of existing art forms.

The Beethoven Frieze is the most famous work here. Klimt painted it for the 14th exhibition of the Vienna Secession, held between 15 April and 27 June 1902.

Practical information

Friedrichstraße 12, 1010 Vienna. Open Tuesday to Sunday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., closed Mondays.

Admission covers the current exhibitions and the Beethoven Frieze together. Check the Secession’s own site for the current price, which it publishes through its ticket shop rather than as a fixed table.

5. Go on your own Otto Wagner tour

Otto Wagner’s buildings are spread across Vienna and most of them are free to look at from the street, so the cheapest Modernism in the city is a walk. Here is the selection we did on a day when the weather was too good to be indoors.

Art Nouveau houses on the Linke Wienzeile

Two Wagner apartment buildings stand side by side on the Linke Wienzeile near the Naschmarkt. Number 38 carries golden ornaments by Koloman Moser; the colourful number 40 is the Majolikahaus, named after the Spanish tile tradition its facade borrows from.

Linke Wienzeile 38 and 40, 1060 Vienna. Free, from the street.

The Otto Wagner Hofpavillon in Hietzing

The Hofpavillon at Hietzing is the station Wagner built for the emperor, who used it twice. Most Vienna metro stations have two exits; the one at Schönbrunner Schloßstraße can only be left on one side, because the other side was the imperial half, and that half is now a museum.

Wagner designed far more than this pavilion for Vienna’s transport: the stations, railings and bridges of the old Stadtbahn, today’s U4 and U6, are all his.

Schönbrunner Schloßstraße, 1130 Vienna. Open 2 May to 30 September, Friday to Sunday only, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. No ticket is required, and it is closed for a winter break outside that season. This is a reduced schedule: the Hofpavillon used to open more days a week, so a midweek visit no longer works.

The Otto Wagner Villas

Otto Wagner Villa I at Hüttelbergstraße 26 is the house Wagner designed for himself and his family, and it now holds the Ernst Fuchs Museum. The front yard is freely accessible and gives you a good look at the house and the structures Fuchs added later.

Otto Wagner Villa II stands to the left of it as you face it and is a private home, visible only from the street. Wagner built it as a smaller house for himself and his wife after his children had left.

Hüttelbergstraße 26, 1140 Vienna. The Ernst Fuchs Museum is open to the public and occasionally closes for private events, so check its own site for the day you want.

The Kirche am Steinhof and the White City

In Vienna’s 14th district, Wagner’s church of St Leopold am Steinhof sits at the highest point of an early 20th-century psychiatric hospital complex of 12 Art Nouveau pavilions that once functioned as a self-sufficient town, with a theatre, a farm, a nursery, a laundry, a post office and a library. Wien Museum calls it the first modern church in Europe.

Baumgartner Höhe 1, 1140 Vienna. The opening hours have changed substantially and for the better: the church is now open Tuesday to Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., with a winter break from 1 October to 1 May.

Admission is €5 ($5.50, £4.30), or €4 ($4.30, £3.40) reduced, free for under-19s and free for everyone on the first Sunday of each month. If you are working from an older guide that says the church can only be seen on a Saturday afternoon between 4 and 5 p.m. on a guided tour, that is no longer the case.

The church is not step-free: there are 12 steps at the main entrance, no lift and no toilets, and the forecourt is gravel.

The Österreichische Postsparkasse

Wagner built the Imperial-Royal Post Office Savings Bank between 1904 and 1912 and designed its interior architecture and furniture as well. The facade is clad in weatherproof granite and marble fixed with aluminium bolts, and aluminium, new at the time, appears throughout: the railings, the roof figures, the door fittings and the warm-air blowers in the hall.

Georg-Coch-Platz 2, 1010 Vienna. The building is now a site for research, science and art, and the great banking hall is let to the University of Applied Arts Vienna. It stays open Monday to Friday and can be seen without booking, which makes it the easiest Wagner interior in the city to get into.

6. The Upper and Lower Belvedere

The Upper Belvedere holds Klimt’s The Kiss and the largest collection of his paintings in the world, and the Lower Belvedere runs temporary exhibitions inside the state rooms of the same 18th-century palace complex. Both were built as a summer residence for Prince Eugene of Savoy.

The Upper Belvedere’s permanent collection runs from Austrian medieval art to the present day, so the Klimt sits in a long story rather than on its own. On my last trip I had time only for The Kiss at the Upper Belvedere, and went through all the exhibition rooms at the Lower Belvedere instead, where the temporary shows compete for attention with rooms like the Marble Gallery and the Golden Room.

Practical information

Upper Belvedere: Prinz-Eugen-Straße 27, 1030 Vienna. Lower Belvedere: Rennweg 6, 1030 Vienna.

The Upper Belvedere is open daily, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., and admission is €23 ($25, £20), or €19 for over-65s and under-26s, €21.50 with a Vienna City Card and free for under-19s.

The Lower Belvedere is open daily, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and admission is €17 ($18, £14.50), or €13 reduced and €15.50 with a Vienna City Card.

A two-in-one day ticket for both is €32 ($34, £27), which saves €8 on buying them separately, and a three-in-one adding the contemporary Belvedere 21 is €34 ($37, £29). Both Belvedere palaces require a timed-entry ticket, so book a slot rather than turning up.

The Belvedere Gardens are free and always worth the walk between the two buildings. Entry is free with the Vienna Pass, or you can get tickets for the Belvedere here.

Is the Vienna Pass or the Vienna City Card better value?

Take the Vienna Pass if you are visiting several paid museums and the City Card if you mainly want transport and discounts, because they do different jobs. The Pass includes full free entry to a long list of sights; the City Card is a transport card with discounts attached.

The Vienna City Card comes in 24, 48 and 72-hour versions, with or without public transport, and gives discounts at more than 210 attractions, museums, concerts, shops and restaurants. The museums on this page each price the City Card discount themselves: the Leopold takes €2 off, the Belvedere €1.50, the Kunsthistorisches €1.

Run the arithmetic before you buy either. The four Modernism museums here at full adult price come to €19 + €22 + €23 + €17 = €81 ($87, £69), so a pass has to cover most of that plus transport before it pays. If you are doing two museums and walking, neither card is worth it.

You can buy the Vienna City Card here, and the Vienna Pass here.

Where to stay in Vienna

I stayed at the Hotel Schani Wien, which pairs modern technology with old Viennese coffee culture and has a coworking area alongside a lobby and lounge where you can drink coffee, read the paper and get some work done. There is a garden for good weather.

The technology is there to remove friction rather than to remove people. Mobile check-in and check-out gets you in and out quickly and a mobile room key means no physical key to keep track of, which leaves the staff more time for the questions guests actually have.

Breakfast is a buffet from 6.30 to 10 in the morning, 11 at weekends, and if you need to leave earlier than that they will put a takeaway breakfast together for you. Check reviews, prices and availability here.

How to get to Vienna

Fly into Vienna Airport and take the train into the city, or arrive by rail from anywhere in central Europe. I flew direct from Brussels and took the train from the airport into the centre.

Check Trip.com for an overview of flight options and prices.

By train, Vienna is a direct ride from Budapest, Salzburg, Munich, Prague and Bratislava. Look here for train timetables and prices within Europe.

One thing to plan around: from 7 September 2026 until late October 2027, the S-Bahn line through the city centre between Wien Praterstern and Wien Hauptbahnhof is disrupted for works, so check your airport-to-centre route rather than assuming the usual train.

Don’t forget travel insurance

Travel insurance covers you if part of your trip is cancelled, if you get sick or hurt abroad, and sometimes if your electronics break or are stolen. I make sure I am covered on every trip.

Don’t have travel insurance yet? Check out SafetyWing. Their plans are flexible enough to sign up for while you are already travelling, and when I had a claim their support team dealt with it without a fuss.

Vienna museums FAQ

Which Vienna museums are closed on Mondays? The Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Secession are both closed on Mondays. The Leopold Museum is closed on Tuesdays instead, and the Belvedere is open every day, so a Monday in Vienna is a Leopold and Belvedere day.

Where is Klimt’s The Kiss? At the Upper Belvedere, Prinz-Eugen-Straße 27, which is open daily from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. and requires a timed-entry ticket.

Where can I see the Beethoven Frieze? At the Secession on Friedrichstraße, where it is on permanent display. The building is open Tuesday to Sunday and closed Mondays.

Do I need to book Vienna museums in advance? For the Kunsthistorisches and both Belvedere palaces, yes: all three now run on timed-entry tickets. The Leopold and the Secession admit walk-ins, though the Leopold asks groups to book a slot.

How much do Vienna’s Modernism museums cost? Full adult entry is €19 at the Leopold, €22 online at the Kunsthistorisches, €23 at the Upper Belvedere and €17 at the Lower Belvedere, so all four come to about €81 ($87, £69). The Kirche am Steinhof is €5 and Wagner’s Postsparkasse hall and the Linke Wienzeile houses are free.

WonderfulWanderings Pro Tips

The five tips below come from a Vienna Modernism trip and from checking every venue’s current opening times.

1. Book a time slot for the Kunsthistorisches and the Belvedere. Since 8 September 2026 the Kunsthistorisches admits visitors only in reserved slots, and both Belvedere palaces already required them. Once you are in there is no time limit on your visit.
2. The Kirche am Steinhof is far easier to see than most guides say. It is now open Tuesday to Sunday from 10 or 11 a.m. until 5 p.m. for €5, not one hour on a Saturday afternoon with a guide. It is shut from 1 October to 1 May, and the first Sunday of the month is free.
3. Check the day before you plan the Hofpavillon at Hietzing. It now opens Friday to Sunday only, from 2 May to 30 September, with a lunch break from 1 to 2 p.m. It costs nothing when it is open.
4. The Postsparkasse banking hall is the free Wagner interior. It is let to the University of Applied Arts, stays open Monday to Friday and needs no booking, which makes it the easiest of his interiors to walk into.
5. Ask the Freud Museum for the short version of the tour. The full tour runs three to four hours. The shortened version on request was an hour and a half and covered the ground perfectly well.

About the author. This guide is written and maintained by the Wonderful Wanderings editorial team. Wonderful Wanderings was founded in 2012 by Sofie Couwenbergh, and the first-hand notes in this post come from her trip through Vienna’s Modernism collections, where she visited the Leopold Museum, the Kunsthistorisches staircase, the Belvedere and the Freud Museum and walked an Otto Wagner route across the city. The team covers Austria for independent travellers, including the Vienna museum passes, hotels, flights and travel insurance worth booking, and updates this page when opening times and ticket prices change.