VIENNA.- This week, well before the ALBERTINA Museum’s second location—“ALBERTINA modern” at Karlsplatz—opens in March of next year, the museum’s Director General Klaus Albrecht Schröder was able to announce the latest major addition to the museum’s holdings: the Jablonka Collection.

The Jablonka Collection, with its more than 400 works, is one of the most prominent collections of American and German art from the 1980s. It includes works by Mike Kelley, Sherrie Levine, Michael Heizer, Eric Fischl, Philip Taaffe, Roni Horn, Francesco Clemente, Richard Deacon, Damien Hirst, Richard Avedon, Andreas Slominski, and other important figures with whom Rafael Jablonka spent years working, figures whose works he also exhibited and collected. A strong emphasis within this collection is on the oeuvre of Nobuyoshi Araki, who is represented by 240 works.

Since the German art dealer, gallerist, and exhibition curator Rafael Jablonka closed his German galleries for good in 2017, it had been above all German museums that had hoped to benefit from the holdings of his monumental private collection.

Jablonka has stated that one reason behind his eventual choice of the ALBERTINA Museum was its location in Vienna: Vienna lies midway between Poland (where he was born), Germany, and Switzerland (his country of residence). But it was in fact for several reasons that he chose the ALBERTINA Museum as a safe haven for his collection.

“In any case, I wanted to find the best, the right museum for artists who I hope will be just as important to people 30 or 50 years from now as Picasso is to them today,” says Rafael Jablonka. The ALBERTINA Museum is rich in tradition and has weathered 250 years’ worth of national crises and the most horrific wars. And currently, the ALBERTINA Museum—as a dynamic European institution—is undergoing a process of transformation. Rafael Jablonka would like to play a small role in the ongoing changes that have by now taken hold of the entire world, of world society and the world economy. Such upheavals most decidedly do affect museums—and he believes that the ALBERTINA Museum is reacting accordingly.

Klaus Albrecht Schröder, Director General of the ALBERTINA Museum, confirms this assessment: “The ALBERTINA Museum’s profile, image, and radius of action have had to change entirely over the past two decades due to the constant process of transformation being undergone by the material that art museums keep, collect, and exhibit.”

For the Director General, who was just recently appointed for his fifth five-year term of office, Jablonka’s trust amounts to an affirmation of the strategy of growth and diversification that he has spent 20 years pursuing: “A central point in my most recent application was the establishment of our second location in Vienna: ALBERTINA modern. So my reappointment affirmed not only the objective of my museum strategy but also Vienna’s aspiration to become one of the leading cities for the art of our era. And it is indeed the case that, following a long phase of stagnation in the museum scene during which Austria rested on laurels earned back in the days of the monarchy, the dawn of our present century has seen Vienna once again advance to become an art metropolis of the first rank by establishing new museums ranging from the Leopold Museum to Belvedere 21 along with putting up new museum buildings and remodeling and modernizing old ones.”

The Rafael and Teresa Jablonka Foundation
Rafael Jablonka’s first step was to transfer his collection to a foundation. This foundation was to be permanently anchored at a museum, so that the museum in question would still be able to take care of the collection’s artworks 100 years from now. The ALBERTINA Museum, thought Rafael Jablonka, would be just such an institution.

After all, the decision whether to leave one’s collection to the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, the MoMA, or the Whitney Museum in New York, for example, also always involves a bit of gut instinct. Such a decision is, thankfully, one that every collector must make for him or herself.

Rafael Jablonka ultimately decided on the ALBERTINA Museum because its collection includes works by artists such as Rubens, Schiele, Picasso, and Malewitsch. And he believes that museums are most interesting when they integrate private collections while themselves proceeding with a collector’s passion.

Klaus Albrecht Schröder is elated at having succeeded in securing yet another important collection for Austria: “Happily, there are more and more collectors in the world today who, like Peter Ludwig, Rudolf Leopold, and Herbert and Rita Batliner, seek to leave behind their own collections as their legacy. Collections as such are valuable cultural assets that speak volumes in a historical sense. This is why politicians shouldn’t be allowed to divide them up and tear them apart at will. Foundation constructs prevent this from happening.”

Museum Collection Grows by 400 Works
The 400 works that Rafael Jablonka has now entrusted to the Albertina Museum’s care enable the museum to round out important chapters of recent art history. One need no longer make the pilgrimage to Los Angeles or to New York in order to see Mike Kelley’s visions and installations about the mysterious town of Kandor or his unsettlingly monstrous bundles of knotted-together stuffed animals. The ALBERTINA Museum also now holds seven monumental sculptures by land art pioneer Michael Heizer, whose works can otherwise only be encountered in the USA. And the trap objects by Andreas Slominski— from his smaller 1980s works to his most recent large-scale installations—are considered by the ALBERTINA Museum’s director general to be “among the most exciting manifestations of present-day art. What’s more,” he continues, “Eric Fischl is an artist to whom we already devoted an exhibition years ago—and now, thanks to Rafael Jablonka, twelve of his artworks from the past 40 years will be joining the ALBERTINA Museum’s collection to confront us with their anxieties and compulsions, with the dark side of human existence. Finally, I can’t overstate the significance that we attach to Sherrie Levine’s works. For a museum like ours, her art is important corrective—a warning about the commercial commodification of iconic artworks that causes their significance to disappear amidst all the pompous hype.

With Buddha, as the artist ironically called her glossy polished bronze sculpture done after Marcel Duchamp’s legendary Fountain, Sherrie Levine critically undermines the exaggerated attributions of meaning to Dadaist art, which originally sought to be fresh and rebellious.

The Jablonka Collection at the ALBERTINA Museum
In 2020, the ALBERTINA Museum will be presenting the Jablonka Collection to the public in several exhibitions at its main location. This introduction will be kicked off during the summer with works by the Italian-American artist Francesco Clemente, founder of the transavantgarde movement.

While ALBERTINA modern at Karlsplatz will spend the autumn of 2020 exhibiting masterpieces of international art from the Essl Collection, the ALBERTINA Museum’s main location will be presenting this most recent addition to its holdings in a large-scale exhibition alongside its Modigliani retrospective.

2021 will then see the ALBERTINA Museum’s Photographic Collection exhibit works from the Jablonka Collection by Nobuyoshi Araki, the most famous living Japanese photographer, in the form of his important series Sentimental Journey of 1964.

At present, the Jablonka Collection is being transported from various locations in Europe to the ALBERTINA Museum’s new central repository for contemporary art in Klosterneuburg.