Anna Spitzmüller (1903–2001), the first female custodian at the Albertina Museum in Vienna

Abstract

The following paper by Ursula Drahoss was first presented at the conference “Great Female Art Historians” organized by Heidrun Rosenberg at the Austrian Association of Art Historians (VöKK) from November 4th to 7th 2021. The art historian Anna Spitzmüller (1903–2001) is considered Austria’s very first woman curator. Spitzmüller worked at the Collection of Graphic at the Albertina from 1927 to 1954 and then switched to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, from where she retired in 1968. In her article, Ursula Drahoss will take a closer look at Spitzmüller’s professional experiences. It can be seen that art historians, despite similar starting points, ended up in different positions in the museum of their time. Besides the analyses and interpretation of biographic data, archival documents, the author will also include Spitzmüller’s subjective experiences from oral history sources.

Keywords

• art historian
• anna spitzmüller
• agnes mongan
• eva and otto benesch
• art education
• interwar period
• world war ii
• print collection albertina