The Batliner Collection: How a Liechtenstein Lawyer Lent the Albertina Its Modern Masters

Claude Monet painted The Water Lily Pond between 1917 and 1919, in the last decade of his life. Today it belongs to a collection in Vienna that a lawyer from Liechtenstein and his wife began assembling in the 1960s. Since autumn 2007 the Batliner Collection has been on permanent loan to the Albertina, and it has changed what kind of museum the Albertina is.

A collector with a day job

Herbert Batliner was born on December 26, 1928, to a father from Liechtenstein and a mother from Austria. His professional life, as the Albertina’s tribute describes it, divided between building an international law firm in Vaduz and serving the principality’s courts. He was for many years president of Liechtenstein’s Administrative Court, and later president of its State Court, which acts as the country’s constitutional court.

He collected alongside his wife, Rita Batliner. Their interests were not fashionable at the start. In the 1960s Batliner was buying Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and other German Expressionists, painters whom many still regarded as “degenerate”. He also went after the painters those artists had learned from, Matisse and the Fauves, and after the Russian avant-garde, from Malevich to Chagall.

The most personal thread was Alberto Giacometti. Batliner bought sculptures and paintings by the Swiss artist while Giacometti was still alive, and later said that Giacometti “became the driving force behind this rapidly growing collection for me personally.” In his later years his attention moved toward contemporary art, and those purchases account for the large groups of work by Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, Arnulf Rainer and Alex Katz that the Albertina now holds.

The 2007 loan

In 2007 Batliner entrusted the collection to the Albertina as a permanent loan. The museum describes the result as one of the largest and most important private collections of classical modernist painting in Europe: some 500 works covering about 130 years, from French Impressionism to the present.

For the Albertina the loan filled a gap. Klaus Albrecht Schröder, then director general, called the Batliner loan the moment that allowed the museum “to establish its first large display collection that would be permanently open to the public.” Batliner’s support for the building went further back. He played a decisive part in the decision of the Propter Homines Foundation to fund the museum’s Propter Homines Hall, donated in 2000, where the museum’s major temporary exhibitions have been held since.

The arrangement also drew official recognition. Austria awarded Batliner its Grand Decoration in Gold with Star for services to the Republic in 1999, and in 2007, the year of the loan, the mayor of Vienna, Michael Häupl, gave him the Grand Decoration in Gold for services to the city.

What is on the walls

The collection is broad enough to teach the history of modern painting from a single source, and the permanent display is organised that way. The French section includes Monet’s water lilies, Two Dancers by Edgar Degas, and Farm in Normandy by Paul Cézanne, with work by Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, Renoir and Signac. Braque, Derain and Matisse follow, then German Expressionism, from the Brücke painters to Der Blaue Reiter, with Kirchner and Erich Heckel among them.

The Russian holdings are unusually deep for a Western private collection. They cover Neo-Primitivism, Cubo-Futurism, Constructivism and Suprematism, with Natalia Goncharova, Lyubov Popova, Mikhail Larionov, Marc Chagall and Kazimir Malevich. Chagall’s The Kite dates from 1926. Malevich’s Man in a Suprematist Landscape was painted around 1930 or 1931.

Picasso is represented in depth. The collection includes 40 works by him, spanning more than six decades and running from Cubism to the late experiments; Woman in a Green Hat of 1947 and Mediterranean Landscape of 1952 are among them. Surrealism is represented by Max Ernst, René Magritte and Joan Miró. Austria has its own chapter, with Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka and Albin Egger-Lienz. The postwar section brings in Giacometti, Francis Bacon, Gerhard Richter, Baselitz, Kiefer and Katz.

A collection that kept growing

A permanent loan is not a static thing. The Albertina’s annual report for 2015 counts the Batliner Collection as one of the museum’s five main collecting areas, next to the graphic arts, architecture, contemporary art and photography. That year the Batliners added a large-format painting by Anselm Kiefer and a group of Picasso ceramics. The same report describes the museum’s display collection as drawn chiefly from the Batliner holdings, shown in changing presentations with different emphases, and notes that works from the collection also travel to the Albertina’s temporary exhibitions and to partner institutions abroad. In 2015 the permanent presentation, titled Monet bis Picasso, occupied the Kahn Galleries.

The collection has also served as the base for a series of monographic exhibitions at the museum, on Picasso, Magritte, Max Ernst, Matisse and Monet among others.

After Herbert Batliner

Herbert Batliner died on June 8, 2019, at the age of 90. Schröder’s verdict on his importance to the institution was blunt: without him, the museum would not be what it is now. Since his death, Rita Batliner and the couple’s four children, Angelika Moosleithner, Thomas Batliner, Caroline Egger and Alexander Batliner, have overseen the future of the collection.

The Albertina’s own texts still describe the collection as a permanent loan, and that status shapes how it is read. The paintings are not absorbed into a state inventory. They remain a private collector’s choices, shown in a public museum, which is why the display still reads as one family’s account of modern art: early faith in the German Expressionists and the Russians, a lasting attachment to Giacometti, a deep run of Picasso, and a late turn to painters who were still working when Batliner bought them.

The museum puts the audience for its modern and contemporary holdings at more than a million visitors a year. For many of them the Albertina’s account of modernism is, in practice, the Batliners’ account.