Leopold museum presents the legendary actress tilla durieux

Leopold Museum Presents the Legendary Actress Tilla Durieux | News | Press | Leopold Museum.

The Leopold Museum is dedicating the first comprehensive exhibition to the celebrated star of the theater and film Tilla Durieux Durieux was a modern woman of the s who was politically active and whose roles were as varied as the list of artists who portrayed her. The presentation Tilla Durieux. A Witness to a Century and Her Roles explores the fascination the Vienna-born and Berlin-based actress held already for her contemporaries.

Based on the depictions of Tilla Durieux, we might tell the story of Modernist portraiture.

The first large-scale exhibition on the famous star of the theater follows the traces of a scintillating personality through.

This marked the birth of the legendary stage persona Tilla Durieux. Over the years, she performed in all the major European theaters and liked to take on challenging roles — not only on stage but, from , also in silent movies. In , Durieux met her first husband, the painter and graphic artist Eugen Spiro — The exhibition at the Leopold Museum shows how the artist created personal portraits of his wife in a private setting, capturing intimate moments of happiness and togetherness.

However, the couple divorced in after Durieux had met the art dealer and publisher Paul Cassirer. The couple continued to surround themselves with artists and intellectuals even in their Swiss exile from Besides, Tilla Durieux preferred to entrust her likeness to women artists. When she was portrayed by Auguste Renoir , who at the time of the sittings was already gravely ill, Tilla Durieux was deeply moved by her conversations with the artist, whose portrait of the actress comes to the exhibition as a loan from the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

Over time, Durieux became close with Ernst Barlach whose sculptures are also shown in the exhibition at the Leopold Museum. Posing in theater roles or plain clothes came with the territory of being an actress.