Max Weiler (1910–2001) numbers among his generation’s most important and productive creators of drawings: his over 70-year artistic career produced a 3,500-work drawn oeuvre that includes virtually all formats and techniques.

Max Weiler and the Albertina Museum enjoyed a long and fruitful relationship. Beginning in the early 1950s, the museum regularly acquired works on paper by him, thus facilitating an overview of his output. But the first presentation of his drawn oeuvre in its entire depth and diversity was a was a retrospective in 2011, in the realization of which the artist’s widow Yvonne Weiler (who died in 2015) played a major role.

Now, Robert Najar—the heir and trustee of Weiler’s artistic legacy—has donated to the Albertina Museum 17 works that substantially expand the museum’s Weiler holdings by works from important creative periods. In the ten-meter-long charcoal drawing Kunst ist Natur. Naturgebild [Art is Nature. Natural Construct] (1985), his most important work in this art form, Max Weiler reflects on the processual nature of life as well as of drawing itself.