The Kunsthistorisches Museum
The museum of art history opened on the Ringstrasse in 1891 to hold the imperial collections, and the building — a domed hall, a staircase decorated in part by the young Gustav Klimt — is as much a part of the visit as the contents.
The picture gallery reflects what the Habsburgs ruled and whom they married: it is strong in Flemish, Venetian and Spanish painting and weak in French and English. It holds twelve paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the largest group anywhere, among them the Tower of Babel and Hunters in the Snow, with about 800 Flemish and 400 Venetian paintings. The Kunstkammer shows more than 2,200 objects from the Habsburg cabinets of curiosities, including the gold salt cellar made by Benvenuto Cellini.
The museum is open daily, with a late evening on Thursdays. From 8 September 2026 entry is only at a reserved time, and the museum's own site recommends booking in advance. A ticket admits once, with no limit on the length of the visit.
The Natural History Museum, its twin across the square, opened in 1889. Its best-known object is the Venus of Willendorf, a limestone figure about eleven centimetres high and some 29,500 years old, found in Lower Austria in 1908.
The Albertina
The Albertina occupies a former Habsburg palace behind the State Opera and holds one of the largest collections of drawings and prints in the world: about 65,000 drawings and around a million prints, among some 1.2 million works. Dürer's Hare belongs to it, though works on paper as fragile as that are shown only occasionally. A long-term loan, the Batliner Collection, has added a permanent display of painting from Monet to Picasso.
The Albertina Modern, opened in 2020 in the Künstlerhaus on Karlsplatz, shows art since 1945.
The Belvedere
The Upper Belvedere holds Austrian art from the Middle Ages onwards, and 24 oil paintings by Klimt, the largest collection in the world, including The Kiss. Works by Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka hang with them. The palace and its history are described under the imperial palaces of Vienna.
The MuseumsQuartier
The imperial stables, built in the eighteenth century opposite the Hofburg, were converted into a cultural quarter that opened in 2001. It has about 90,000 square metres of floor space and houses more than 50 institutions around a set of courtyards that are open at all hours.
- The Leopold Museum has the largest collection of work by Egon Schiele in the world — 44 paintings and more than 200 works on paper — with Klimt and the design of the Wiener Werkstätte.
- mumok, the Museum of Modern Art, covers the twentieth century from classical modernism to Pop Art and Viennese Actionism.
- The Kunsthalle Wien shows contemporary exhibitions, the Architekturzentrum Wien covers architecture, and the ZOOM museum is for children.
The Wien Museum
The city's own museum, on Karlsplatz, reopened on 6 December 2023 after being rebuilt and enlarged. Its permanent exhibition tells the history of Vienna from the Roman camp to the present, and admission to it is free — the tourist board describes it as the first public museum in Austria to adopt that arrangement. It holds about 400 drawings by Klimt, most of them not on permanent display.
The museum also runs a number of smaller sites, among them Otto Wagner's pavilions on Karlsplatz and several composers' apartments.
Around 1900
Besides the Belvedere and the Leopold, three places show the art and design of Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century. The Secession has Klimt's Beethoven Frieze in the building for which it was made. The MAK, the Museum of Applied Arts on the Ringstrasse, holds the archive of the Wiener Werkstätte. And the Sigmund Freud Museum is at Berggasse 19, the apartment in which Freud lived and worked from 1891 until he was forced to leave for London in 1938; it reopened, enlarged, in 2020. The couch is in London.
History
- The Imperial Treasury, in the Hofburg, holds the crowns and regalia of the Holy Roman Empire and of Austria.
- The House of Austrian History, in the Neue Burg, opened in November 2018 and covers the republic since 1918.
- The Museum of Military History, in the Arsenal, shows the car in which Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot at Sarajevo in 1914, and the uniform he was wearing.
- The Jewish Museum has two sites, in Dorotheergasse and on Judenplatz, where the excavated remains of the medieval synagogue lie beneath the memorial by Rachel Whiteread to the 65,000 Austrian Jews murdered in the Holocaust, unveiled in 2000.
- The Weltmuseum, also in the Neue Burg, is the ethnographic museum, and holds the feather headdress long associated with the Aztec ruler Moctezuma.
- The Technical Museum, near Schönbrunn, opened in 1918.
Newer arrivals
The Vienna Actionism Museum opened in the centre in 2024, and Foto Arsenal Wien, a venue for photography, in 2025.
Before going
Children and young people under 19 are admitted free to the federal museums, which include the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the Natural History Museum, the Albertina, the Belvedere, mumok, the MAK and the Technical Museum. The Leopold Museum is a private foundation and sets its own terms.
Closing days differ from one museum to the next and several are shut one day a week, so the day matters when planning. The Long Night of Museums, organised by the national broadcaster on the first Saturday of October, opens most of them into the small hours on a single ticket.