Join us for a visit to one of the most luxurious private museums in Vienna, the Ernst Fuchs Museum at the fantastic Villa Otto Wagner.
In 1888, Otto Wagner, famous Jugendstil architect, designed and built a villa for himself and his family in Hütteldorf which was then an elegant suburb of Vienna bordering the Wiener Wald. The summer palais in the style of a Roman villa was an international architectural sensation of the time. In 1900, Wagner turned the left wing into one of the most stunning Jugendstil halls of all of Vienna with the precious Tiffany glass windows.
Until 1911, the Viennese crème de la crème feted legendary summer balls in the villa. During WWII, the nazis expropriated the villa and used it for Hitler Youth activities. After the war the house fell into oblivion and was endangered by decay.
Ernst Fuchs was born in Vienna in 1930. He was a painter, a draftsman, a printmaker, a sculptor, an architect, a stage designer, a composer, a poet, and, perhaps most importantly, one of the founders of the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism that he brought to culmination in the Otto Wager Villa that he acquired in 1972 for restoring it as Ernst Fuchs Museum that he opened in 1988.
Fuchs had many peculiar sides and turns in his artistic life that he developed into the verschollener Stil , Hidden Prime of Styles. He published his theory in "Architecture Caelestis: Die Builder des verschollenen Stils" in 1966. He experimented with industrial design in the 1970s with a 500-piece run of the upscale Suomi tableware by Timo Sarpaneva that he decorated for the German Rosenthal. In 1993, Fuchs was one of the first Western artists ever to be given a retrospective exhibition at the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg. A keen royalist and father to 16 children, he died in Vienna at the age of 85 on 9 November 2015.
When you enter the villa, you see fantastic walls, ceilings, floors that would be enough for a museum on its own - of Mr. Wagner. Fuchs’s fantastic art adds an extraordinary layer to the museum with his furniture, lamps and his art in the house and in the garden, including the famous fountain.
The tour through the house leads you to an exit after the Tiffany Glass hall and you can walk around the villa to see the fantastic fountain and the garden statues. You will end up at the Gallerie Café Esther situated is in the former gatehouse. When you enter, there is first a shop where you can find a coffee table book home and a lot of literature for the connoisseurs and gift items for the umpteenth cousin. Then, sip a coffee with a piece of cake or a glass of wine in the café - there is also a lovely terrace outside. If you are in Vienna around big celebration times, book the whole café and bring bring your own food and drinks or order catering from the café!
The museum is unfortunately not good for handicapped visitors. There is no lift and there are several staircases between the levels in the main floor and to the first floor.
There is a men’s loo in the ground floor and one for women in the second but no accessible one.
Ernst Fuchs Museum A - 1140 Wien, Hüttelbergstrasse 26
https://ernstfuchsmuseum.at
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