Museum Kitzbühel

The town history museum with a major collection of works by Tyrolean painter Alfons Walde

Museum Kitzbühel occupies a building in the heart of the old town and covers the full history of the area — from Roman times, through the medieval copper-mining boom, the rise of winter sports, and the cultural life of the twentieth century. The permanent exhibition on the history of skiing in Kitzbühel is particularly good, tracing the development of the sport from the first wooden skis in the 1890s to the World Cup era.

The major draw for art lovers is the Alfons Walde collection — a comprehensive gathering of works by the Kitzbühel painter who became the defining visual voice of the Austrian ski resort between the wars. Walde's snow scenes, with their flat planes of blue and white and their stylised skiing figures, are immediately recognisable and widely reproduced. The museum has the originals.

things to do museum
A story
Alfons Walde (1891–1958) was a Kitzbühel architect and painter who spent his career depicting the Tyrolean winter landscape in a style somewhere between Symbolism and Art Nouveau — bold colours, stylised figures, and an almost dreamlike quality of snow and light. His paintings defined the visual identity of the Kitzbühel winter long before the ski resort itself became famous. The museum holds the largest public collection of his work.