Greater than 100 works of Austrian Expressionism are being gifted to Los Angeles County Museum of Artwork by the household of Otto Kallir, a famend artwork seller who immigrated to America in 1938 after the German Reich annexed Austria. The artwork can be transferred to LACMA over the subsequent a number of years and consists of the museum’s first work by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Richard Gerstl.
In 1939, Kallir based Galerie St. Etienne in New York, which turned instrumental in establishing Austrian Expressionism in America, stated Kallir’s granddaughter Jane Kallir. Jane took over the gallery with Kallir’s enterprise associate, Hildegard Bachert, after Kallir’s loss of life in 1978, and ran it for 40 years earlier than launching the Kallir Analysis Institute.
Austrian Expressionists, together with masters like Klimt and Schiele, “had no reputation outside of Austria then,” Jane advised The Occasions, including that Kallir constructed them up “by collaborating with museums and donating to museums.”
When Kallir died and Jane surveyed the work he left behind, she started pondering that if funds allowed, she’d wish to in the future full her grandfather’s mission.
“Self Portrait With Brown Background” by Egon Schiele, 1912.
(Kallir Analysis Institute, New York)
In recent times, she fortunately realized she would be capable to do exactly that. The query of the place to donate the artwork got here subsequent, and Jane stated there weren’t many locations that got here into play when she was on the lookout for establishments with a long-standing dedication to Germanic modernism. For that reason, it quickly turned clear that LACMA was the reply, alongside the Getty Analysis Institute, which may also obtain a choice of uncommon Viennese books, portfolios and prints that Kallir revealed.
A good portion of the Kallir present consists of works on paper, which can be housed at LACMA’s Robert Gore Rifkind Heart for German Expressionist Research underneath the care of curator Timothy O. Benson. Benson is curating a present that includes 24 works from the present, titled “Austrian Expressionism and Otto Kallir,” which is able to open Nov. 23 and run by way of Could 31, 2026.
“German expressionism has always been something of an outlier in terms of American museum exhibition and collecting priorities,” Jane stated. “And honestly, when I think about it, there is no institution in the United States that is the equal to LACMA in terms of the groundbreaking scholarship it’s done in this field.”
Fairly a little bit of that scholarship has been finished by Stephanie Barron, senior curator and head of fashionable artwork at LACMA, who has spent many years constructing her information within the area by contributing to arts periodicals and books in addition to staging exhibitions, together with “German Expressionist Sculpture” (1982), “Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany” (1991), “Exiles + Émigrés: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler” (1997) and “New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic, 1919–1933” (2015), amongst others.
Barron famous that L.A. has a protracted historical past of attracting achieved Viennese emigres, together with Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra, and that within the late Nineteen Thirties and ’40s, a brand new wave of artists, actors, writers and thinkers who have been fleeing the Nazis helped seed a thriving Austrian group in Southern California.
LACMA’s energy up till now, nonetheless, was German Expressionism, Barron stated, including that the museum’s assortment of Austrian Expressionism was weak.
“It’s been a lacuna, and it’s been something that I really never thought we’d have a prayer of fixing,” stated Barron. “So just to be able to have Klimt and Schiele paintings for the collection, to enhance our Expressionist holdings, is something that’s been a longtime dream of mine. I am deeply grateful for that.”
The work can be crated and shipped in waves. The primary group incorporates an beautiful 1897 Klimt portrait, titled “Woman With Fur Collar,” that Barron described as “small but mighty.”
Additionally of observe: two Schiele landscapes that Jane referred to as “blockbusters.”
“Sawmill” by Egon Schiele, 1913.
(Kallir Analysis Institute, New York)
“They are both seminal works from a key period in the artist’s life,” Jane stated. “They’re large, they’re fabulous. The paintings are going to be complemented by at least nine or 10 works on paper. And Schiele is an artist who was also known for his watercolors and drawings.”
“In one fell swoop, Los Angeles becomes a center for Schiele studies,” Jane stated.Elevating and learning Schiele is one thing that occupied each Jane and her grandfather over the course of their skilled careers, Jane stated.
When Kallir fled the Nazis in 1938, instantly after the annexation of Austria, he had no downside taking Schiele work, watercolors and drawings out of Austria “because the Nazis considered Schiele degenerate,” Jane stated. The artist additionally had no worldwide worth. This turned an issue as soon as Kallir acquired to New York as a result of he couldn’t promote something.
Kallir held Schiele’s first one-person present within the U.S. in 1941. “Drawings were priced at $20 each. Watercolors were priced at $60 each. And he did not sell a single one. He sold one painting — a very small painting — for $250, and the guy who bought it paid out the $250 in $13 monthly installments over a period of two years.”
It’s actually wonderful, Jane stated, to check that second to Schiele’s repute right this moment. Thankfully for Angelenos, a few of that work will quickly be on view.
