Welcome to Austria. A Summer Holiday in Pictures

Austria is rightly regarded as a classical holiday country. Over a hundred years ago, when tourism was still in its infancy, and holidays still meant the annual move in summer from the city to the countryside, there were already a number of institutions that were competing for the custom of Austrian and foreign guests. Since 1900, use has been made above all of visual material for advertising purposes.

Until well into the 1970s, the most important medium was the poster. Famous graphic designers used attractive pictorial solutions to attract visitors to the advertised destinations – whether an idyllic lakeside landscape or an impressive mountain scene. The artists created landscapes of desire that were designed to attract holidaymakers to potential holiday destinations – in many languages and in thousands of copies. At the same time, the posters reflect the historical development and the story of success of Austrian tourism since 1900.

The focus of the pictorial motifs is on the wonderful landscape, whether advertising for Austria as a whole, a particular province, a town or a region. The surface of the poster is thus simultaneously a surface for the projection of a visual history of Austria.

The second significant advertising medium in connection with the history of tourism was the photograph. Famous photojournalists, commissioned by the tourism advertising industry, made official Austria as »pretty as a picture«, in the way it likes to see itself. At the same time, Austria as a holiday country is to be found in the numerous snapshots by amateur photographers, often glued into lovingly arranged holiday albums.

Famous personalities posed against the magnificent background of the Austrian landscape, such as Gustav Klimt by Lake Attersee, Arthur Schnitzler on the Semmering and of course Emperor Franz Joseph in Bad Ischl.