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 supplier who immigrated to America in 1938 after the German Reich annexed Austria. The artwork might 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.
The reward additionally consists of work, drawings, prints and posters from Alfred Kubin, Oskar Kokoschka and Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, in addition to German artists Lovis Corinth and Käthe Kollwitz. The information comes two months after LACMA was gifted its first work by Vincent van Gogh and Édouard Manet by the Pearlman Basis, which is dividing its celebrated assortment of Impressionist, Put up-Impressionist and Modernist artwork amongst three museums.
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 companion, Hildegard Bachert, after Kallir’s dying 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 fame exterior 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 prefer to sooner or later 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 of 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. Because of this, 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 reward consists of works on paper, which might be housed at LACMA’s Robert Gore Rifkind Heart for German Expressionist Research below the care of curator Timothy O. Benson. Benson is curating a present that includes 24 works from the reward, titled “Austrian Expressionism and Otto Kallir,” which is able to open Nov. 23 and run by means of Could 31, 2026.
“German expressionism has at all times been one thing of an outlier when it comes to American museum exhibition and gathering priorities,” Jane stated. “And actually, after I give it some thought, there isn’t any establishment in the US that’s the equal to LACMA when it comes to the groundbreaking scholarship it’s achieved on this area.”
Fairly a little bit of that scholarship has been achieved by Stephanie Barron, senior curator and head of fashionable artwork at LACMA, who has spent many years constructing her data within the area by contributing to arts periodicals and books in addition to staging exhibitions, together with “German Expressionist Sculpture” (1982), “Degenerate Artwork: The Destiny of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany” (1991), “Exiles + Émigrés: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler” (1997) and “New Objectivity: Fashionable German Artwork within the Weimar Republic, 1919–1933” (2015), amongst others.
Barron famous that L.A. has an extended historical past of attracting completed 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 power 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 one thing that I actually by no means thought we’d have a prayer of fixing,” stated Barron. “So simply to have the ability to have Klimt and Schiele work for the gathering, to boost our Expressionist holdings, is one thing that’s been a longtime dream of mine. I’m deeply grateful for that.”
The work might be crated and shipped in waves. The primary group comprises an beautiful 1897 Klimt portrait, titled “Lady With Fur Collar,” that Barron described as “small however mighty.”
Additionally of observe: two Schiele landscapes that Jane referred to as “blockbusters.”
“Sawmill” by Egon Schiele, 1913.
(Kallir Analysis Institute, New York)
“They’re each seminal works from a key interval within the artist’s life,” Jane stated. “They’re giant, they’re fabulous. The work are going to be complemented by at the least 9 or 10 works on paper. And Schiele is an artist who was additionally recognized for his watercolors and drawings.”
“In a single fell swoop, Los Angeles turns into a middle for Schiele research,” 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 drawback taking Schiele work, watercolors and drawings out of Austria “as a result of the Nazis thought-about Schiele degenerate,” Jane stated. The artist additionally had no worldwide worth. This turned an issue as soon as Kallir received 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 have been priced at $20 every. Watercolors have been priced at $60 every. And he didn’t promote a single one. He bought one portray — a really small portray — for $250, and the man who purchased it paid out the $250 in $13 month-to-month installments over a interval of two years.”
It’s actually superb, Jane stated, to check that second to Schiele’s fame immediately. Thankfully for Angelenos, a few of that work will quickly be on view.
