Liechtenstein's culture keeps a prince's gallery and a village calendar

Why Liechtenstein's famous paintings were collected in Vienna

The Princely Collections are the property of the reigning family, and the Historisches Lexikon des Fürstentums Liechtenstein counts them among the most important private collections in the world. They run from the middle of the fourteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth and take in painting, sculpture, decorative arts, prints and arms. Their weight falls on the Baroque: paintings by Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck and Rembrandt, and sculpture by Giambologna, Adriaen de Vries and Massimiliano Soldani Benzi.

The collecting began long before the family owned land on the Rhine. It started with Karl I (1569 to 1627), raised to the rank of prince in 1608 and appointed chief steward at the court of the Emperor Rudolf II in 1600. Rudolf was himself one of the leading collectors of his day, and Karl gave commissions to the goldsmiths, gem cutters and sculptors working for him in Prague. Two life-size bronzes by Adriaen de Vries, Christ in Distress and Saint Sebastian, came out of that circle and are still among the collection's central works. Inventories of the princely wardrobe from 1613 and 1620 list carpets, furniture, gold and silver plate, rock-crystal vessels and paintings.

The Lexikon names his son Karl Eusebius (1611 to 1684) as the real founder, because his interest went past what his rank required. He had churches and castles built or remodelled on the family estates at Lednice and Valtice, today in the Czech Republic, wrote a treatise on architecture in his own hand and bought Italian small bronzes and Dutch and Flemish paintings. He advised his heirs to build "beautiful monuments to eternal and immortal memory".

His son Johann Adam Andreas (1657 to 1712) took the advice literally. He built a town palace near the imperial Hofburg in Vienna, to serve as residence and gallery, and a garden palace in the Rossau suburb, both designed by the Italian architect Domenico Martinelli. The collections moved into the town palace from Valtice. The Rubens paintings he bought, among them the Decius Mus cycle, and his van Dycks are what the collection is still known for. He was also the prince who bought the lordship of Schellenberg in 1699 and the county of Vaduz in 1712, as Liechtenstein: history sets out. The same prince paid for the lordships and for the Rubens paintings, and the paintings went to Vienna.

Later princes added to it without moving it. Josef Wenzel (1696 to 1772) commissioned Bernardo Bellotto's two views of the garden palace around 1759 and received gifts that included a KPM table service from Frederick the Great and six Spanish ceremonial guns from Joseph II. Johann I (1760 to 1836) bought no fewer than 711 paintings, mostly Dutch and early German, and between 1807 and 1810 moved the gallery to the garden palace, where visitors could already see it on request. Johann II (1840 to 1929) reached back to the Gothic and Renaissance masters of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, added Viennese Biedermeier painting and chose to leave modern art alone. From the middle of the nineteenth century the collections had scholarly curators, and the Berlin museum director Wilhelm von Bode advised Johann II for decades.

How the princely collections came to Vaduz

The collections crossed to the Rhine valley because the family did. Johann II had renovated Schloss Vaduz between 1905 and 1914, and Franz Josef II chose it as his residence when he left Vienna in 1938, after Germany annexed Austria. During the war the collections, then under an export ban, were brought to Vaduz "under the most difficult conditions", in the Lexikon's phrase, and so escaped looting and destruction. They have been housed in the castle, which is the prince's private residence, since the end of the Second World War.

The family sold part of the collection after the war. It lost its estates in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia to expropriation in 1945, and Franz Josef sold numerous works to make up for them. The Lexikon calls the sales "not uncontested". The best known went abroad: Leonardo da Vinci's portrait Ginevra de' Benci was bought by the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1967. His son brought the sales to a close, and since the middle of the 1970s the collections have been growing again through new purchases.

Their public life has since been split between two countries. Parts were shown in changing exhibitions in the Engländerbau in Vaduz from 1952 and, since 2000, in the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein. Larger surveys travelled to Lucerne in 1948, New York in 1985 and 1986, and Jerusalem and Luxembourg in 1995. A plan for a purpose-built art house in Vaduz failed in the 1980s, and from 2004 the collection returned to the garden palace in the Rossau, which had been closed since 1938 and operated as the Liechtenstein Museum from 2004 to 2011. Britannica also records a Liechtenstein Treasure Chamber, opened in 2015, which housed a Fabergé egg, the family's crown jewels and lunar rock presented to the principality by NASA.

How Liechtenstein got an art museum of its own

The state's collection began with a wedding present. When the hereditary prince Hans-Adam married Countess Marie Aglaë Kinsky, Maurice Arnold de Forest, Count of Bendern, gave the state ten oil paintings from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries on 4 July 1967. The gift led in 1968 to the Liechtensteinische Staatliche Kunstsammlung, a foundation under public law charged with collecting, conserving and showing art. Under its first curator, Georg Malin, who served until 1996, it concentrated on prints and sculpture of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and it began exhibiting in the Engländerbau in 1969.

In the same year Franz Josef II offered to lend the country a large part of his arms and art collection if the state provided suitable rooms. The offer produced the Liechtensteinische Kunstgesellschaft, which helped bring a design for a Kunsthaus by the Munich architect Alexander von Branca to the table in 1980. Voters approved the project in two referendums. A cross-party committee then took it to court between 1983 and 1985, in what became known as the Staatsgerichtshof affair, and the Kunsthaus was never built.

The temporary arrangement in the Engländerbau lasted another fifteen years. A private foundation set up in April 1997 built a new museum for 30 million francs, mostly from private money, designed by the Basel and Zurich architects Morger, Degelo and Kerez as a single dark block of tinted concrete and black basalt. It opened on 12 November 2000. The foundation gave the building to the state, which had supplied the land and undertaken to run the museum, and the state collection was renamed the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein on 1 July 2000.

Its buying policy since 1997 follows three lines set under the curator Friedemann Malsch: rational tendencies in art, Surrealism and its heirs, and the Italian contribution since 1900, from Futurism to Arte povera. It also buys work by artists from Liechtenstein and regularly shows loans from the princely collections. Britannica records that a building for the Hilti Art Foundation opened in Vaduz in 2015 to show one of the principal private collections in the country.

Why Liechtenstein's museums opened so late

The Lexikon puts the late start down to a country that stayed rural and industrialised late, while Europe's first museums had opened in the eighteenth century as civic places of learning, the British Museum in 1753 and the Louvre in 1793. The first exhibition was a display arranged in Schloss Vaduz in the 1890s, shown there between 1894 and 1905, and its holdings became the core of the Liechtensteinisches Landesmuseum, founded in 1954. The national library and the national archive followed in 1961. The growth came in the second half of the twentieth century, which the Lexikon ties to a wider expansion of the economy, education and culture.

Stamps were a state matter. An agreement with Austria in 1911 on post, telegraph and telephone services allowed Liechtenstein to issue stamps of its own, and in the depression of the 1930s stamp sales were one of the income streams that let the state and communes pay for public works. The Curta is a mechanical calculator made by Contina AG in Liechtenstein from 1946 to 1972.

From the 1960s most communes, all except Vaduz, Planken and Schellenberg, began collecting their own cultural objects. Schaan opened a village museum in its town hall in 1982 and reopened it in 1998 as the Dorfmuseum Schaan. Triesen stores its collection in the Frühmesserhaus and shows it at the Gasometer cultural centre, opened in 2006. Ruggell has the Küefer-Martis-Huus from 2002, Balzers the Alter Pfarrhof from 2011, and Mauren a room given to small trades from 2006.

What the Landsbrauch of the Vaduz county regulated

The village half of the culture has its own written source. In the early modern county, the collected rules of local law were called the Landsbrauch, and a copy of 1667 survives. It stayed in force until 1808. It regulated custom as much as property, from a strict view of morals.

It set the budget and the number of guests at a christening meal, limited the gifts in kind that could be brought to a new mother and exempted only the godparents. It shows that weddings were held over several days in inns, with dancing, and it laid down that any Vaduz citizen not home by midnight on his wedding day lost his Alprecht, his share in the summer pastures. It limited the funeral meal to relatives and people from outside the village, to hold down costs. It banned masking at Fasnacht, particularly men and women dressing as each other, and the Lexikon records that the ban was ignored. It records carol singers and star beggars going from house to house at Christmas, New Year and Epiphany, and a custom of throwing people into the village fountain on Ash Wednesday that is otherwise forgotten.

Village life enforced its own rules as well. A record from 1810 describes the "Ausschällen": when a wife who had left her husband went back to him, the village boys went through every street at night, shouting, cracking whips and ringing Alpine cowbells, to the couple's house, and justified it by "ancient rights". The Lexikon describes a small society split into still smaller village societies, where everyone's conduct was visible and social control was highly effective. The shaming customs have since died out.

How the village year runs from Advent to Funkensonntag

The calendar of custom follows the Catholic church year. The Christmas season runs from the first Sunday of Advent to Epiphany. Around 1900 Saint Nicholas, called "Sammekloos" in Balzers, brought the presents on 6 and 24 December; the Christ Child brings them now. The star singers of Epiphany have survived, and the money the children collect goes to an aid project. Children who wish adults a happy new year are given coins for it, and the wish is said in a fixed form.

Street Fasnacht opens on Schmutziger Donnerstag. Children blacken their faces, a custom called "Ruassla", once with sooty bacon rind and now with burnt corks. The Lexikon notes that young men used to steal the neighbours' lunch from the pot, and that the custom is remembered but seldom carried out. Masked balls begin soon after Epiphany. Schaan has held a Fasnacht parade since 1952, other communes followed, Fasnacht newspapers have appeared since 1921, and the brass bands called Guggamusik, organised as clubs in many communes, supply the noise. The Monsterkonzert, held since 1976, brings together Guggamusik bands from Liechtenstein and across the border.

On the Sunday after Ash Wednesday comes Funkensonntag, when Funken guilds build and burn a bonfire, the Funken, topped by a figure of a witch. In Balzers the whole task fell until after 2000 to the young men of one year group, who gathered the wood, built the stack and made the witch and the torches. On that evening "Küachle", a fried pastry, were once handed to suitors as a sign of consent; now they are sold at the Funken stall. Until about the middle of the twentieth century a red Easter egg was a love token that a young woman gave the man she wanted.

The national holiday also sits on a church feast. It falls on 15 August, the Assumption, and is marked with fireworks, bonfires on the heights and, since 1939, a torchlight procession on the Fürstensteig mountain path. The whole population is invited to the castle, where speeches are made and free beer is served. Saint Martin's Day on 11 November, once a day for settling debts and for the parish fair, now has lantern processions for kindergarten children, and it also opens the next Fasnacht with the symbolic handing over of keys.

What the valley's farm work left in its customs

Several customs outlived the work they came from. Hemp processing and maize husking were done communally in pre-industrial Liechtenstein, in houses taken in turns to save wood and light. The Landsbrauch calls them "Liecht und Kunkhellhäuser"; the usual name was "Spinnstubete". The spinning evenings were described as gone by 1916, because the cotton industry had made home-grown hemp and linen pointless.

Maize, known locally as "Türken", has been grown in Liechtenstein since the eighteenth century and was a staple food into the twentieth. "Türkenausziehen" was the autumn evening when family, relatives and neighbours stripped the cobs for storage, and a celebration followed once the maize hung under the roof. The Lexikon notes that both evenings gave young men and women a rare chance to meet. With its economic reason gone, the husking is now staged for nostalgia.

The end of the summer on the Alps is still marked by the Alpabfahrt, when herdsmen bring the cows down to the villages decorated with flowers and bells. The best milkers also carry a small wooden heart on the forehead, and afterwards the hearts are nailed to the outside wall of the cowshed. The Lexikon records the Alpabfahrt hearts as a custom of the Oberland, the former county of Vaduz. On building sites a small fir tree fixed to the ridge marks the roofing-out, and the owner stands the workers food and drink.

Who speaks and believes what in Liechtenstein

German is the official language, and 92% of the population gave it as their main language in 2020. The language of the home is another matter: 73% speak an Alemannic dialect, far from Standard German and close to the dialects of neighbouring Switzerland and Vorarlberg. Britannica traces the dialect to the Alemanni who entered the region after 500 CE and notes local variation in sound and vocabulary. The poet Ida Ospelt-Amann published only in the dialect of Vaduz, and village clubs still stage plays in local dialect.

Triesenberg speaks differently. Walser settlers from the Valais were given land on its slopes around the turn of the fourteenth century, cleared the forest for the terraces the village stands on, and kept a Walser German dialect that the commune now promotes. Their village museum, opened in 1961, was the first in the country.

Catholicism is the state church under the constitution, and the church year still sets the public holidays. The 2010 census counted 75.9% of the population as Catholic. The church's hold has weakened: the Lexikon points to fewer churchgoers, the introduction of civil marriage in 1974 and the church's withdrawal from schooling except for religious education. In 1997 Liechtenstein was separated from the diocese of Chur and became the Archdiocese of Vaduz, against protests from the government, the Landtag and part of the population.

Much of the rest of cultural life runs through clubs. Freedom of association arrived in 1862, and music and singing societies, reading clubs and shooting, gymnastics and cycling clubs formed across the country. After 1945 the state took on a share of the cost: a culture and youth council from 1964, a music school from 1963, the Theater am Kirchplatz from 1972 and an art school from 1993. The Liechtenstein Musical Company, the annual Guitar Days and the International Josef Gabriel Rheinberger Society are among the music organisations that use the two main theatres.

Where Liechtenstein's Olympic medals came from

Liechtenstein first sent a team to the Olympic Games in 1936, and every medal it has won since has come from Alpine skiing, ten in all. Hanni Wenzel took bronze in 1976 and two golds and a silver in 1980; her brother Andreas won silver in 1980 and bronze in 1984 in the giant slalom, and her daughter Tina Weirather won bronze in the super-G in 2018. The country has one ski area, at Malbun, where a hotel took in skiers from Germany and Belgium from 1934, the road has stayed open all winter since 1959 and a museum of skiing has stood in Vaduz since 1993. Liechtenstein's football clubs play in the Swiss leagues, and the national cup sends one of them into European competition each year.