Join us for a visit to one of the most interesting private museums in Vienna. Arik Brauer museum in his villa in the Viennese Cottageviertel tells you the story of a very extraordinary man.
Arik Brauer (1929 – 2021) was an Austrian painter, printmaker, poet, dancer, singer-songwriter, stage designer, architect, and academic teacher. His father was Lithuanian Jew and his mother Austrian and he grew up in Vienna under the Nazi regime. For the Nazis he was a Jew, for the Austrians around, not really. His father was murdered by the Nazis but Brauer survived WWII hiding in a garden colony.
After studies of painting in the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and singing at the Musikschule der Stadt Wien, he travelled broadly and married with his wife Dahabani in Israel in 1957, and eventually settled in Paris where he formed a singing duo with his wife. From 1963, they shared their time between Ein Hod, Israel and Vienna where he appeared as a singer-songwriter and dancer in the era of Austropop, designed buildings in both countries and exhibited at international galleries and museums. Some of his Volkslieder, sung in dialect, are still sung in company in Heurigen and alpine huts.
As a painter he started getting attention as a member of a circle of artists called the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism from mid1950’s onwards, together with names such as Ernst Fuchs, Rudolf Hausner, Wolfgang Hutter, Fritz Janschka, Maître Lehrer, and Anton Lehmden.
In 1975, Brauer designed the stage sets and costumes for a production of Mozart’s Magic Flute at the Paris Opera. In the 1990s, he turned to architecture, with projects in Austria and Israel. The façades and interiors of his buildings are covered with fantastical mosaics, murals, and painted tiles. One other greatest examples is the Arik-Brauer-Haus in Vienna.
In 2003, Arik Brauer opened a museum showing a remarkable collection of his most important paintings and ceramic figures in the basement of his Viennese villa in the Cottage Quarter.
Brauer died in Vienna at age 92 on 24 January 2021 and his ashes were buried in Vienna Central Cemetery.
As a private museum, the collection is not open to walk in but you need to book a time slot for a guided tour. Just check the museum’s website. On a cold or rainy day, you might wish to arrive on the hour - they make you wait outside before opening the doors at the time of your booking. The museum is not accessible as you have to take pretty steep stairs to enter the basement exhibition room. There is a unisex loo under the stairs on the right just before entering the exhibition room. There is no café and you probably need to take a bus to go back to the centre for a glass of bubbly after the exhibition but before, you might wish to check the small desk of items on sale.
Arik Brauer Collection Museum
Colloredogasse 30, 1180 Vienna
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