24 works from this gift will be on view beginning November 23, 2025
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has announced a gift of more than 130 works of Austrian Expressionism from the family of Otto Kallir, including the first paintings by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Richard Gerstl to enter the collection. Transferred to LACMA over several years, the donation broadly surveys Austrian Expressionism from its roots at the turn of the 20th century to the 1920s with paintings, more than 100 drawings, prints, and posters, and a selection of works by artist-designers who were affiliated with the Wiener Werkstätte, founded in 1903. In addition to the paintings by Klimt, Schiele, and Gerstl, the donation includes works by Oskar Kokoschka, Alfred Kubin, and Marie-Louise von Motesiczky and by the German artists Lovis Corinth and Käthe Kollwitz.
A venerable art dealer active in Vienna from the early 1920s, Otto Kallir (1894-1978) emigrated in 1938 after the National Socialist annexation of Austria. Arriving in New York in 1939, he established the Galerie St. Etienne, which continued to advance the work and legacy of Austrian Expressionists for 80 years. Many of the works in the gift were brought by Kallir from Vienna when he emigrated. Following his death in 1978, the gallery was run for 40 years by his granddaughter Jane Kallir, together with his business partner Hildegard Bachert. The Galerie St. Etienne closed in 2020, and Jane Kallir, a recognized scholar of Austrian modernism, has established The Kallir Research Institute, which promotes critical research on Austrian and German Expressionism
A selection of 24 works from this gift will be on view beginning November 23, 2025. Curated by Timothy O. Benson, Helgard Field Curator of the Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies, Austrian Expressionism and Otto Kallir will be presented in the Modern Art Galleries on BCAM, Level 3, through May 31, 2026. “
Gustav Klimt (1862-1919) has long been considered a fountainhead of Austrian Expressionism by virtue of his radical approach to figuration and his lasting influence over other members of the Austrian avant-garde, among them, the younger Egon Schiele (1890-1918). The Kallir gift offers the opportunity to track Klimt’s groundbreaking engagement with the human form across the two final and defining decades of his oeuvre with eight drawings and a painting.
Gustav Klimt, Woman with Fur Collar, 1897, gift of Kallir Family photos courtesy Kallir Research Institute, New York
The shimmering and intimate Woman with the Fur Collar (1897), puts the artist’s Symbolist impulse on ample display, and bears witness to the beginning of an artistic revolution in the Austro-Hungarian capital with Klimt’s co-founding of the Vienna Secession the same year.
The core of the gift are the 27 works by Schiele, two major landscape paintings of 1913 and 19 works on paper including 14 unflinching studies of the human figure, the most celebrated aspect of his oeuvre.
Egon Schiele, Self-Portrait with Brown Background, 1912, gift of Kallir Family; photos courtesy Kallir Research Institute, New York
The four Schiele self-portraits, created in a span of six years, evidence the pace of Schiele’s unprecedented stylistic development, culminating in the outstanding and deeply probing Self-Portrait with Brown Background (1912), which was executed at the height of his ill-fated romance with Wally Neuzil.
Egon Schiele, Sawmill, 1913, Kallir Family Collection, promised gift to Los Angeles County Museum of Art; photos courtesy Kallir Research Institute, New York
Egon Schiele The Bridge: 1913;
The two Schiele landscape paintings are remarkable not only for their vigor, but also for marking turning points in Kallir’s life. The Bridge was shown in 1923 at the first posthumous Schiele exhibition organized by Kallir in his Neue Galerie in Vienna, and Kallir brought it and Sawmill with him when he fled Nazi-occupied Austria for New York.
Coming of age during the tumultuous last decade of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Kallir began professionally championing the legacy of Schiele and Klimt soon after their passing in 1918. In the case of the tragically short-lived Richard Gerstl (1883– 1908), Kallir’s efforts around 1931 directly led to the recuperation of the little-known artist’s estate and its introduction to the Viennese public via Gerstl’s first posthumous exhibition the same year.
Much sought-after but extremely rare are the five works by Gerstl in the gift, including the crystalline and piercing Self-Portrait, thought to have been executed a mere five weeks before the artist ended his life at the age of 25.
The enigmatic work of Bohemian artist Alfred Kubin (1877-1959) has recently experienced a resurgence of interest; the gift of 10 works complements the museum’s two drawings and 46 prints by him, making possible a more comprehensive presentation of his work. The first Austrian Expressionist to attain international renown,
Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980) led an itinerant life on a pan-European scale. One of his earliest travels to Italy is documented in the gift by two lively, veduta-like seascapes from 1913, both formerly owned by his lover Alma MahlerWerfel, the widow of the illustrious composer and conductor Gustav Mahler and, in Page 4 the 1940s, a prominent Los Angeles émigré. Two later Kokoschka drawings of women attest to the innovative potential of drawing as a modernist medium, prefiguring the gestural and compositional vitality of Willem de Kooning.
Similar to Kokoschka, Kallir did not limit himself to the Austrian art scene and quickly became a proponent of international, especially German, art. During his lifetime, Kallir devoted 15 solo exhibitions to Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945), and the gift brings two important preparatory charcoal drawings, which provide clues about the creative process behind two corresponding, iconic prints already in the Rifkind Center’s collection.
The gift also creates an opportunity to narrate the full extent of the prominent Berlin Secessionist Lovis Corinth’s (1858-1925) activities as a prolific draughtsman and printmaker via a landscape painting, 42 works on paper, and two sketchbooks. The depth of Austrian-German interactions in the artistic sphere is further exemplified by two early portraits by the Viennese-born Marie-Louise Motesiczky (1906-1996), who was a student of Max Beckmann in Frankfurt in the 1920s.
