Franz Hubmann. Artist Portraits
The Helmut Klewan Donation

The ALBERTINA MUSEUM is devoting a monographic exhibition to Franz Hubmann (1914–2007), one of Austria’s most important postwar photojournalists. The works shown here come from the Klewan Collection, the bulk of which is now to pass step-by-step into the ALBERTINA MUSEUM’S holdings as a donation.

Franz Hubmann first became known in the 1950s for his photo reportages. He left his mark on the visual appearance of the cultural magazine magnum (est. 1954), whose main photographer he remained until 1963. In his influential photo series, he employed his alert gaze to place human beings front and center. All the way up to his death, Hubmann persisted in the creation of an extremely multifaceted oeuvre that not only bears witness to Austria’s cultural and social history as well as the history of its everyday life but also looks beyond the country’s borders in numerous works of portrait, architectural, and landscape photography.

This ALBERTINA MUSEUM exhibition concentrates on a selection of artist portraits taken by Hubmann between the 1950s and the 1990s. His images of Picasso, Chagall, Giacometti, and Warhol are matched in their immediacy and candidness by those of Lassnig, Rainer, and Wotruba. In such photographs, Hubmann convincingly demonstrates his instinct for expressive moments and his interest in the human face. What’s more, many of the personalities photographed by him are represented by works in the collection of the ALBERTINA MUSEUM.

Helmut Klewan (*1943) opened his first gallery in Vienna in 1970, which was joined in 1978 by a second location in Munich. As a fixture of the Viennese art and cultural scene, this gallerist became a companion and friend of numerous artists and helped many of them to achieve greater international presence by way of exhibitions at his gallery. In Vienna, Klewan remained active as a gallerist until 1984, while he ran his gallery in Munich until 1999. Since then, he has been present above all as a collector and a lender of works.

The exhibition is on view from 2 July until 17 October 2021.