MAK - Museum of Applied Arts

The MAK's comparative strength is applied art and design read as a continuous line rather than a series of period rooms: 18th-century Viennese porcelain and Venetian and Bohemian glass sit in the same institution as the Wiener Werkstaette's early 20th-century furniture and metalwork, Klimt's Stoclet Frieze cartoons, and a basement gallery that treats a 1926 fitted kitchen and a living fashion designer's own archive as belonging to the same design-history argument. That range, more than any single object, is what specialists cite when they distinguish MAK from a general fine-art museum with a decorative-arts department attached.

The MAK - the Museum fuer angewandte Kunst, or Museum of Applied Arts - was founded on 7 March 1863 by Rudolf von Eitelberger, Vienna's first professor of art history, on the model of London's newly opened South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum). The idea, shared across several European capitals in the 1860s, was that industry and craft needed direct contact with historical design if they were to compete with British and French manufacturing, and that the way to provide it was a museum a working tradesman could actually walk into. The collection opened provisionally in 1864 in rooms of the old Ballhaus on Ballhausplatz, before Emperor Franz Joseph gave it a purpose-built home on the newly laid-out Ringstrasse.

Heinrich von Ferstel, already at work on the Votivkirche, designed the new building in an Italian Early Renaissance style, faced in raw brick with terracotta and majolica ornament framing the entrance. It opened to the public on 15 November 1871, the first museum building to be completed on the Ring - earlier than the Naturhistorisches and Kunsthistorisches museums on Maria-Theresien-Platz. An attached School of Applied Arts followed at Stubenring 3 in 1877, training the same tradesmen the museum's collection was meant to instruct, and an extension on Weiskirchnerstrasse was added in 1906-1908. At the center of Ferstel's plan is a glass-roofed arcade courtyard on 32 stone columns, still the space every visitor crosses on the way into the galleries, and still commonly cited as the clearest surviving statement of what a Ringstrasse museum was supposed to look like from the inside.

The permanent collection is arranged by material and period rather than by single-artist rooms, which is itself a small argument the museum makes about applied art: that a chair, a bolt of textile and a piece of porcelain belong in the same conversation as painting and sculpture. The Vienna 1900 rooms carry that argument furthest, gathering Wiener Werkstaette furniture, metalwork, textiles and graphic design as a coherent design movement rather than as decorative footnotes to Klimt and the Secession painters. The Asia collection holds Chinese, Japanese and Korean material including Qing-dynasty temple paintings and Qianlong-period porcelain; the Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo rooms hold historical textiles, lace and church and court commissions; the Empire and Biedermeier rooms hold early 19th-century Viennese furniture together with the Sobek clock collection, transferred from the museum's Geymuellerschloessel branch in the 18th district. A dedicated Textiles and Carpets presentation covers a holding that goes back to the museum's founding purpose as a study collection for Vienna's own textile trades.

In the basement, the MAK Design Lab breaks the historical sequence deliberately. Built with the Austrian design studio EOOS out of the museum's former study collection, it sets historic applied arts against 21st-century design across themed islands covering cooking, sitting, production, transport and communication - including a rebuilt example of Margarete Schuette-Lihotzky's 1926 Frankfurt Kitchen, treated here as a design-history landmark rather than a curiosity - and houses the Helmut Lang Archive, the fashion designer's own retained collection of his work. The arrangement makes an explicit case that applied art does not stop being made, and that a museum built in 1871 to train tradesmen in historical craft has an equally direct stake in the design decisions being made now.

The nine cartoons Klimt made in 1910 and 1911 for the dining-room frieze of the Stoclet House in Brussels are the single most cited object in the MAK's collection. They are full-scale working drawings, not the mosaic itself - the frieze in Brussels was executed by the Wiener Werkstaette and the dedicated Wiener Mosaikwerkstaette in enamel, mother-of-pearl and gold leaf, following instructions Klimt wrote directly onto the drawings specifying which materials to use where. The design unfolds across three sections - Expectation, the Tree of Life and Fulfilment - and draws openly on Egyptian, Byzantine and Japanese sources the Stoclet family had themselves collected, which is part of why the museum treats the cartoons as the clearest surviving record of how Klimt actually worked at the largest scale he ever attempted. The cartoons went through an extended conservation programme before being reinstalled in the MAK's permanent Vienna 1900 rooms, and a dedicated exhibition in 2012 set them alongside material on Klimt's own engagement with Japanese painting.

The MAK describes itself as having pursued a program of provenance research and restitution since 1998, addressing the period between 1939 and 1945 when Austrian museums, MAK included, took in confiscated private collections; this is the museum's own stated position rather than a claim this page has verified case by case, and it is recorded here as an open question the museum's own provenance department, not this archive, is positioned to answer in full.

More immediate is an episode from the current exhibition calendar. On the afternoon of Thursday 27 August 2026, during normal opening hours, two men who had bought ordinary admission tickets to GLANZSTUECKE - a jewellery exhibition pairing roughly 300 Van Cleef and Arpels pieces with masterworks from the MAK's own collection, running since June - used a hammer to shatter a display case and took a 200-carat platinum necklace set with 673 diamonds that had once belonged to Queen Nazli of Egypt, who wore it at her daughter's 1939 wedding to the future Shah of Iran. The pair fled on foot; Austrian police released security-camera images and pursued the theory, reported by the Kronen Zeitung, that it was a contract job for a criminal gang. No one was hurt, and there were witnesses in the room at the time. A guided tour scheduled for that Friday afternoon was cancelled and the exhibition was closed temporarily before reopening; it remains on show, MAK's own listing confirms, through 27 September 2026. The necklace itself, sold at Sotheby's in New York in 2015 for 4.3 million dollars, has not been recovered. The Guardian's report placed the theft inside a documented run of 2025-2026 European museum robberies - the Louvre's crown-jewel theft the previous October, a Bronze Age gold hoard taken from Spain's Museo de Villena, and a hammer-and-sledgehammer break-in at a museum in Messina, Sicily - that Europol has separately described as trending toward more frequent and more violent methods against under-secured display cases in institutions built, like the MAK itself, well before that threat existed.

The MAK stands at Stubenring 5 in Vienna's first district, reachable on foot from the Stubentor stop (U3 underground line and tram line 2) or from Landstrasse/Wien Mitte (U3, U4, five S-Bahn lines and the City Airport Train). It opens Tuesday to Sunday, with an extended Tuesday evening slot to 9pm at a reduced admission after 6pm, and is closed on Mondays. Standard adult admission is 19 euros on-site or 18 euros booked online in advance; visitors under 19 are admitted free on any day, and companions of visitors with disabilities are admitted free. All levels of the main building and the exhibition spaces are wheelchair-accessible by elevator, and the ground-floor shop and the independently run Salonplafond restaurant are step-free. Private photography without flash or tripod is permitted throughout the permanent collection. A visitor who wants the Vienna 1900 rooms and the glass-and-ceramics galleries properly, rather than as a walkthrough, should plan on two to three hours; seeing every permanent-collection room plus a current temporary exhibition is closer to a full day.

MAK is consistently framed, by its own programming and by outside coverage, as Vienna's design-forward counterpart to the city's fine-art museums: smaller and less visited than the Kunsthistorisches Museum nearby, but with a Wiener Werkstaette and Vienna 1900 collection that specialists treat as unmatched, and a track record of using its contemporary-art and digital programming as a working laboratory rather than a fixed period display. Coverage in the second half of 2026 has been dominated by a single, damaging security failure rather than by the collection.