Kallir, Vienna, and me
When I heard that Jane Kallir and the Kallir Family Foundation were donating 130 works of Viennese and German art to LACMA, I was so excited that I had to contact the Rifkind Center’s Director Tim Benson right away to get more details. Tim knew why: I worked as the Rifkind’s librarian for some ten years during which time I often lamented the Museum’s dearth of Viennese art, my real love and area of expertise. I was also at the Museum when Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer (1907) arrived in Los Angeles with great fanfare, after the successful restitution claim by her heir Maria Altman. When I found out the specific offerings in this bequest, some of which were from Otto Kallir’s original collection, a wave of nostalgia and memories came flooding back.
Erika Esau on the Heldenplatz, Hofburg, Vienna, 1970.
I first visited Vienna in 1966, only 17, as part of a summer course I took in Salzburg to advance my study of German. But it was a year spent in Vienna, courtesy of my college’s Junior Year Abroad program, that changed my life and revealed to this suburban California girl a new, much more sophisticated, world. Vienna has been for fifty years the city I know best and love the most. In that college year, our art history professor was Anna von Spitzmüller, or “Spitzi”, as everyone called her. She was Austria’s first female curator, who when at the Albertina in the 1930s and 1940s had secured a large collection of Egon Schiele’s graphic art for the Museum. Her apartment, where she had lived since 1913, was filled with artworks by those fin-de-siecle artists that we were just learning about. She knew everyone who was important in the Viennese art world and introduced us to several of the dealers who represented the artists of the Secession and the Wiener Werkstätte. This was in 1969-70, the time of the first “discoveries” by the rest of the world of Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. It was the period when Klimt’s painting The Kiss (1909) became a poster sold at supermarkets, to hang in every college girl’s dorm room. I could have bought a Klimt drawing then for $200—if I had had that kind of money! Because of Spitzi and her enthusiasm for the art of her beloved city, I determined to become an art historian focusing on German and Austrian art. (I have written Spitzi’s story in my book, Three German Women: Personal Histories from the Twentieth Century, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020).
Otto Kallir’s Neue Galerie, Vienna, 1924.
Egon Schiele exhibition at Galerie St. Etienne, New York, 1960.
A decade later, I was in the doctoral program in the History of Art at Bryn Mawr College. I was writing my dissertation on the Viennese artist Anton Romako (1832-1889), a so-called “proto-Expressionist” who influenced later Expressionist artists. Romako was unknown in the U.S., while Klimt and Schiele were just beginning to experience overwhelming popularity here, a circumstance for which Otto Kallir (1894-1978), with his New York gallery Galerie St. Etienne, was chiefly responsible. In the 1920s Kallir had opened the Neue Galerie in Vienna devoted to Austrian and German art. (The Neue Galerie in present-day New York City takes its name from Kallir’s Viennese space.) In 1938, as a Jew, he was forced to flee, first to Switzerland, then France where he opened his first Galerie St. Etienne, and eventually to New York. Luckily, he was able to bring his inventory with him, which included artists such as Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka, Klimt and Kallir’s discovery, Richard Gerstl, who were then virtually unknown in America. Kallir mounted a Schiele exhibition in New York in 1941, which received little attention. He offered a Schiele painting to MoMA’s Alfred Barr; the director turned it down. As the writer of Kallir’s Wikipedia entry recounts, “At Egon Schiele’s first American exhibition, drawings were priced at $20, watercolors at $60; none sold.” American art collectors—the very few that there were in the 1940s—were only interested in French art, and Nazism and World War II further tainted anything German.
Otto Kallir and Hildegard Bachert at Galerie St. Etienne, 1972
Otto Kallir with Grandma Moses, 1944
Finding these works impossible to sell, Kallir set out to find American artists to represent. This search led to the “discovery” of the American folk artist Grandma Moses. Kallir promoted her art and remained her dealer throughout Moses’ years of tremendous popularity in the 1950s. After the war, interest in his European holdings grew, stimulated by Kallir’s donations to several museums and by his scholarly work, producing, for example, the first catalogue raisonné of Egon Schiele. Soon after his arrival in America, Kallir hired as his secretary the very young Hildegard Bachert (1921-2019), a German who had also fled Hitler; she became his dedicated associate at Galerie St. Etienne. When he died in 1978, Bachert remained at the gallery as co-director along with Kallir’s granddaughter Jane Kallir. Together these two extraordinary women produced numerous exhibitions and catalogs, promoting not only Austrian and German artists, but continuing to represent Grandma Moses’ work and other folk artists, as well as taking on contemporary American artists such as Sue Coe. As an art journal wrote in 2021, when Galerie St. Etienne closed for business after more than 80 years, the records of this institution “represent an older way of doing business in the art world.” As Bachert said, ““The gallery isn’t about buying and selling art like a commodity. We don’t show art that we don’t believe in. We want to be as knowledgeable as possible about what we do.”
Galerie St. Etienne, 24 W. 57th Street, New York
This is the point at which I come back into the picture. Before finishing my research in Vienna on “my” artist Romako, I came to Galerie St. Etienne to find out what materials Otto Kallir might have hidden away about this relatively obscure figure from the art world of nineteenth-century Vienna. I still remember going into the eighth-floor gallery in an office building on New York’s 57th Street, one of the first times I had ventured into a prominent gallery space. Jane Kallir and Hildegard Bachert greeted me and were especially delighted to learn that someone was interested in this field in general and this artist in particular. While the gallery by that time had little to offer on Romako in the way of archival material, we established a correspondence that endured throughout my travels in Vienna and Germany; they continued to send me their little brochure-like catalogs for several years. When many years later I was working at the Rifkind Center, I had several opportunities to contact their gallery again. Hildegard remembered me fondly and inquired about my Viennese research! She remained at the heart of the gallery’s operations for some 80 years, until her death at the age of 98.
Gustav Klimt, Woman with Fur Collar, 1897, LACMA
Richard Gerstl, Self-portrait, 1906-07, LACMA
In 2020, Jane Kallir decided to close the commercial part of Galerie St. Etienne, transferring its archive to a nonprofit organization, The Kallir Research Institute. At the same time, she began to consider where the family’s remaining collections—many works of which were part of Otto Kallir’s original inventory when he arrived in America—should be distributed. Given that LACMA is the home of The Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies, which has had a long-standing relationship with Kallir’s gallery, as well as the fact that the Museum has long sought more works by Viennese artists, Jane Kallir happily chose Los Angeles as the recipient of this generous gift. The current exhibition at the Museum will highlight 24 works from this gift; additional pieces will arrive incrementally, and further exhibitions will occur, along with a planned show with catalogue featuring the entire Kallir collection in 2030. For now, the pieces on display are revealing enough of the richness of this addition to the Museum’s collections. Paintings and drawings by Klimt and Schiele that have had little public display before now are part of this small exhibition, but for me, the inclusion of a drawing by the short-lived Richard Gerstl (1883-1908) is an unprecedented opportunity to learn about this artist, whose artworks and recognition were saved from obliteration by Kallir himself in the 1920s. Waiting to see what other treasures appear in the years to come is an exciting and pleasurable anticipation, and reason to follow the Museum’s exhibition schedule for the next few years.
“Austrian Expressionism and Otto Kallir” is currently on exhibit at LACMA’s Rifkind Gallery, BCAM, Level 3. It will be on display until May 31, 2026.
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