More than 100 works of Austrian Expressionism are being gifted to Los Angeles County Museum of Art by the family of Otto Kallir, a renowned art dealer who immigrated to America in 1938 after the German Reich annexed Austria. The art will be transferred to LACMA over the next several years and includes the museum’s first paintings by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Richard Gerstl.
The gift also includes paintings, drawings, prints and posters from Alfred Kubin, Oskar Kokoschka and Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, as well as German artists Lovis Corinth and Käthe Kollwitz. The news comes two months after LACMA was gifted its first paintings by Vincent van Gogh and Édouard Manet by the Pearlman Foundation, which is dividing its celebrated collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Modernist art among three museums.
In 1939, Kallir founded Galerie St. Etienne in New York, which became instrumental in establishing Austrian Expressionism in America, said Kallir’s granddaughter Jane Kallir. Jane Kallir took over the gallery with Kallir’s business partner, Hildegard Bachert, after Kallir’s death in 1978, and ran it for 40 years before launching the Kallir Research Institute.
Austrian Expressionists, including masters like Klimt and Schiele, “had no reputation outside of Austria then,” Jane Kallir told The Times, adding that Kallir built them up “by collaborating with museums and donating to museums.”
When Kallir died and Jane Kallir surveyed the work he left behind, she began thinking that if finances allowed, she’d like to one day complete her grandfather’s mission.
“Self Portrait With Brown Background” by Egon Schiele, 1912.
(Kallir Research Institute, New York)
In recent years, she happily realized she would be able to do just that. The question of where to donate the art came next, and Jane Kallir said there weren’t many places that came into play when she was looking for institutions with a long-standing commitment to Germanic modernism. For this reason, it soon became clear that LACMA was the answer, alongside the Getty Research Institute, which will also receive a selection of rare Viennese books, portfolios and prints that Kallir published.
A significant portion of the Kallir gift is composed of works on paper, which will be housed at LACMA’s Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies under the care of curator Timothy O. Benson. Benson is curating a show featuring 24 works from the gift, titled “Austrian Expressionism and Otto Kallir,” which will open Nov. 23 and run through May 31, 2026.
“German expressionism has always been something of an outlier in terms of American museum exhibition and collecting priorities,” Jane Kallir said. “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.”
Quite a bit of that scholarship has been done by Stephanie Barron, senior curator and head of modern art at LACMA, who has spent decades building her knowledge in the field by contributing to arts periodicals and books as well as staging exhibitions, including “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), among others.
Barron noted that L.A. has a long history of attracting accomplished Viennese emigres, including Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra, and that in the late 1930s and ’40s, a new wave of artists, actors, writers and thinkers who were fleeing the Nazis helped seed a thriving Austrian community in Southern California.
LACMA’s strength up until now, however, was German Expressionism, Barron said, adding that the museum’s collection 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,” said 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 will be crated and shipped in waves. The first group contains an exquisite 1897 Klimt portrait, titled “Woman With Fur Collar,” that Barron described as “small but mighty.”
Also of note: two Schiele landscapes that Jane Kallir called “blockbusters.”
“Sawmill” by Egon Schiele, 1913.
(Kallir Research Institute, New York)
“They are both seminal works from a key period in the artist’s life,” Jane Kallir said. “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 Kallir said.
Elevating and studying Schiele is something that occupied both Jane Kallir and her grandfather over the course of their professional careers, she said.
When Kallir fled the Nazis in 1938, immediately after the annexation of Austria, he had no problem taking Schiele paintings, watercolors and drawings out of Austria “because the Nazis considered Schiele degenerate,” Jane Kallir said. The artist also had no international value. This became a problem once Kallir got to New York because he couldn’t sell anything.
Kallir held Schiele’s first one-person show in 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 really amazing, Jane Kallir said, to compare that moment to Schiele’s reputation today. Fortunately for Angelenos, some of that work will soon be on view.
More than 100 works of Austrian Expressionism are being gifted to Los Angeles County Museum of Art by the family of Otto Kallir, a renowned art dealer who immigrated to America in 1938 after the German Reich annexed Austria. The art will be transferred to LACMA over the next several years and includes the museum’s first paintings by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Richard Gerstl.
The gift also includes paintings, drawings, prints and posters from Alfred Kubin, Oskar Kokoschka and Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, as well as German artists Lovis Corinth and Käthe Kollwitz. The news comes two months after LACMA was gifted its first paintings by Vincent van Gogh and Édouard Manet by the Pearlman Foundation, which is dividing its celebrated collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Modernist art among three museums.
In 1939, Kallir founded Galerie St. Etienne in New York, which became instrumental in establishing Austrian Expressionism in America, said Kallir’s granddaughter Jane Kallir. Jane Kallir took over the gallery with Kallir’s business partner, Hildegard Bachert, after Kallir’s death in 1978, and ran it for 40 years before launching the Kallir Research Institute.
Austrian Expressionists, including masters like Klimt and Schiele, “had no reputation outside of Austria then,” Jane Kallir told The Times, adding that Kallir built them up “by collaborating with museums and donating to museums.”
When Kallir died and Jane Kallir surveyed the work he left behind, she began thinking that if finances allowed, she’d like to one day complete her grandfather’s mission.
“Self Portrait With Brown Background” by Egon Schiele, 1912.
(Kallir Research Institute, New York)
In recent years, she happily realized she would be able to do just that. The question of where to donate the art came next, and Jane Kallir said there weren’t many places that came into play when she was looking for institutions with a long-standing commitment to Germanic modernism. For this reason, it soon became clear that LACMA was the answer, alongside the Getty Research Institute, which will also receive a selection of rare Viennese books, portfolios and prints that Kallir published.
A significant portion of the Kallir gift is composed of works on paper, which will be housed at LACMA’s Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies under the care of curator Timothy O. Benson. Benson is curating a show featuring 24 works from the gift, titled “Austrian Expressionism and Otto Kallir,” which will open Nov. 23 and run through May 31, 2026.
“German expressionism has always been something of an outlier in terms of American museum exhibition and collecting priorities,” Jane Kallir said. “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.”
Quite a bit of that scholarship has been done by Stephanie Barron, senior curator and head of modern art at LACMA, who has spent decades building her knowledge in the field by contributing to arts periodicals and books as well as staging exhibitions, including “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), among others.
Barron noted that L.A. has a long history of attracting accomplished Viennese emigres, including Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra, and that in the late 1930s and ’40s, a new wave of artists, actors, writers and thinkers who were fleeing the Nazis helped seed a thriving Austrian community in Southern California.
LACMA’s strength up until now, however, was German Expressionism, Barron said, adding that the museum’s collection 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,” said 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 will be crated and shipped in waves. The first group contains an exquisite 1897 Klimt portrait, titled “Woman With Fur Collar,” that Barron described as “small but mighty.”
Also of note: two Schiele landscapes that Jane Kallir called “blockbusters.”
“Sawmill” by Egon Schiele, 1913.
(Kallir Research Institute, New York)
“They are both seminal works from a key period in the artist’s life,” Jane Kallir said. “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 Kallir said.
Elevating and studying Schiele is something that occupied both Jane Kallir and her grandfather over the course of their professional careers, she said.
When Kallir fled the Nazis in 1938, immediately after the annexation of Austria, he had no problem taking Schiele paintings, watercolors and drawings out of Austria “because the Nazis considered Schiele degenerate,” Jane Kallir said. The artist also had no international value. This became a problem once Kallir got to New York because he couldn’t sell anything.
Kallir held Schiele’s first one-person show in 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 really amazing, Jane Kallir said, to compare that moment to Schiele’s reputation today. Fortunately for Angelenos, some of that work will soon be on view.
More than 100 works of Austrian Expressionism are being gifted to Los Angeles County Museum of Art by the family of Otto Kallir, a renowned art dealer who immigrated to America in 1938 after the German Reich annexed Austria. The art will be transferred to LACMA over the next several years and includes the museum’s first paintings by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Richard Gerstl.
The gift also includes paintings, drawings, prints and posters from Alfred Kubin, Oskar Kokoschka and Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, as well as German artists Lovis Corinth and Käthe Kollwitz. The news comes two months after LACMA was gifted its first paintings by Vincent van Gogh and Édouard Manet by the Pearlman Foundation, which is dividing its celebrated collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Modernist art among three museums.
In 1939, Kallir founded Galerie St. Etienne in New York, which became instrumental in establishing Austrian Expressionism in America, said Kallir’s granddaughter Jane Kallir. Jane Kallir took over the gallery with Kallir’s business partner, Hildegard Bachert, after Kallir’s death in 1978, and ran it for 40 years before launching the Kallir Research Institute.
Austrian Expressionists, including masters like Klimt and Schiele, “had no reputation outside of Austria then,” Jane Kallir told The Times, adding that Kallir built them up “by collaborating with museums and donating to museums.”
When Kallir died and Jane Kallir surveyed the work he left behind, she began thinking that if finances allowed, she’d like to one day complete her grandfather’s mission.
“Self Portrait With Brown Background” by Egon Schiele, 1912.
(Kallir Research Institute, New York)
In recent years, she happily realized she would be able to do just that. The question of where to donate the art came next, and Jane Kallir said there weren’t many places that came into play when she was looking for institutions with a long-standing commitment to Germanic modernism. For this reason, it soon became clear that LACMA was the answer, alongside the Getty Research Institute, which will also receive a selection of rare Viennese books, portfolios and prints that Kallir published.
A significant portion of the Kallir gift is composed of works on paper, which will be housed at LACMA’s Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies under the care of curator Timothy O. Benson. Benson is curating a show featuring 24 works from the gift, titled “Austrian Expressionism and Otto Kallir,” which will open Nov. 23 and run through May 31, 2026.
“German expressionism has always been something of an outlier in terms of American museum exhibition and collecting priorities,” Jane Kallir said. “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.”
Quite a bit of that scholarship has been done by Stephanie Barron, senior curator and head of modern art at LACMA, who has spent decades building her knowledge in the field by contributing to arts periodicals and books as well as staging exhibitions, including “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), among others.
Barron noted that L.A. has a long history of attracting accomplished Viennese emigres, including Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra, and that in the late 1930s and ’40s, a new wave of artists, actors, writers and thinkers who were fleeing the Nazis helped seed a thriving Austrian community in Southern California.
LACMA’s strength up until now, however, was German Expressionism, Barron said, adding that the museum’s collection 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,” said 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 will be crated and shipped in waves. The first group contains an exquisite 1897 Klimt portrait, titled “Woman With Fur Collar,” that Barron described as “small but mighty.”
Also of note: two Schiele landscapes that Jane Kallir called “blockbusters.”
“Sawmill” by Egon Schiele, 1913.
(Kallir Research Institute, New York)
“They are both seminal works from a key period in the artist’s life,” Jane Kallir said. “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 Kallir said.
Elevating and studying Schiele is something that occupied both Jane Kallir and her grandfather over the course of their professional careers, she said.
When Kallir fled the Nazis in 1938, immediately after the annexation of Austria, he had no problem taking Schiele paintings, watercolors and drawings out of Austria “because the Nazis considered Schiele degenerate,” Jane Kallir said. The artist also had no international value. This became a problem once Kallir got to New York because he couldn’t sell anything.
Kallir held Schiele’s first one-person show in 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 really amazing, Jane Kallir said, to compare that moment to Schiele’s reputation today. Fortunately for Angelenos, some of that work will soon be on view.
More than 100 works of Austrian Expressionism are being gifted to Los Angeles County Museum of Art by the family of Otto Kallir, a renowned art dealer who immigrated to America in 1938 after the German Reich annexed Austria. The art will be transferred to LACMA over the next several years and includes the museum’s first paintings by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Richard Gerstl.
The gift also includes paintings, drawings, prints and posters from Alfred Kubin, Oskar Kokoschka and Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, as well as German artists Lovis Corinth and Käthe Kollwitz. The news comes two months after LACMA was gifted its first paintings by Vincent van Gogh and Édouard Manet by the Pearlman Foundation, which is dividing its celebrated collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Modernist art among three museums.
In 1939, Kallir founded Galerie St. Etienne in New York, which became instrumental in establishing Austrian Expressionism in America, said Kallir’s granddaughter Jane Kallir. Jane Kallir took over the gallery with Kallir’s business partner, Hildegard Bachert, after Kallir’s death in 1978, and ran it for 40 years before launching the Kallir Research Institute.
Austrian Expressionists, including masters like Klimt and Schiele, “had no reputation outside of Austria then,” Jane Kallir told The Times, adding that Kallir built them up “by collaborating with museums and donating to museums.”
When Kallir died and Jane Kallir surveyed the work he left behind, she began thinking that if finances allowed, she’d like to one day complete her grandfather’s mission.
“Self Portrait With Brown Background” by Egon Schiele, 1912.
(Kallir Research Institute, New York)
In recent years, she happily realized she would be able to do just that. The question of where to donate the art came next, and Jane Kallir said there weren’t many places that came into play when she was looking for institutions with a long-standing commitment to Germanic modernism. For this reason, it soon became clear that LACMA was the answer, alongside the Getty Research Institute, which will also receive a selection of rare Viennese books, portfolios and prints that Kallir published.
A significant portion of the Kallir gift is composed of works on paper, which will be housed at LACMA’s Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies under the care of curator Timothy O. Benson. Benson is curating a show featuring 24 works from the gift, titled “Austrian Expressionism and Otto Kallir,” which will open Nov. 23 and run through May 31, 2026.
“German expressionism has always been something of an outlier in terms of American museum exhibition and collecting priorities,” Jane Kallir said. “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.”
Quite a bit of that scholarship has been done by Stephanie Barron, senior curator and head of modern art at LACMA, who has spent decades building her knowledge in the field by contributing to arts periodicals and books as well as staging exhibitions, including “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), among others.
Barron noted that L.A. has a long history of attracting accomplished Viennese emigres, including Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra, and that in the late 1930s and ’40s, a new wave of artists, actors, writers and thinkers who were fleeing the Nazis helped seed a thriving Austrian community in Southern California.
LACMA’s strength up until now, however, was German Expressionism, Barron said, adding that the museum’s collection 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,” said 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 will be crated and shipped in waves. The first group contains an exquisite 1897 Klimt portrait, titled “Woman With Fur Collar,” that Barron described as “small but mighty.”
Also of note: two Schiele landscapes that Jane Kallir called “blockbusters.”
“Sawmill” by Egon Schiele, 1913.
(Kallir Research Institute, New York)
“They are both seminal works from a key period in the artist’s life,” Jane Kallir said. “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 Kallir said.
Elevating and studying Schiele is something that occupied both Jane Kallir and her grandfather over the course of their professional careers, she said.
When Kallir fled the Nazis in 1938, immediately after the annexation of Austria, he had no problem taking Schiele paintings, watercolors and drawings out of Austria “because the Nazis considered Schiele degenerate,” Jane Kallir said. The artist also had no international value. This became a problem once Kallir got to New York because he couldn’t sell anything.
Kallir held Schiele’s first one-person show in 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 really amazing, Jane Kallir said, to compare that moment to Schiele’s reputation today. Fortunately for Angelenos, some of that work will soon be on view.
More than 100 works of Austrian Expressionism are being gifted to Los Angeles County Museum of Art by the family of Otto Kallir, a renowned art dealer who immigrated to America in 1938 after the German Reich annexed Austria. The art will be transferred to LACMA over the next several years and includes the museum’s first paintings by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Richard Gerstl.
The gift also includes paintings, drawings, prints and posters from Alfred Kubin, Oskar Kokoschka and Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, as well as German artists Lovis Corinth and Käthe Kollwitz. The news comes two months after LACMA was gifted its first paintings by Vincent van Gogh and Édouard Manet by the Pearlman Foundation, which is dividing its celebrated collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Modernist art among three museums.
In 1939, Kallir founded Galerie St. Etienne in New York, which became instrumental in establishing Austrian Expressionism in America, said Kallir’s granddaughter Jane Kallir. Jane Kallir took over the gallery with Kallir’s business partner, Hildegard Bachert, after Kallir’s death in 1978, and ran it for 40 years before launching the Kallir Research Institute.
Austrian Expressionists, including masters like Klimt and Schiele, “had no reputation outside of Austria then,” Jane Kallir told The Times, adding that Kallir built them up “by collaborating with museums and donating to museums.”
When Kallir died and Jane Kallir surveyed the work he left behind, she began thinking that if finances allowed, she’d like to one day complete her grandfather’s mission.
“Self Portrait With Brown Background” by Egon Schiele, 1912.
(Kallir Research Institute, New York)
In recent years, she happily realized she would be able to do just that. The question of where to donate the art came next, and Jane Kallir said there weren’t many places that came into play when she was looking for institutions with a long-standing commitment to Germanic modernism. For this reason, it soon became clear that LACMA was the answer, alongside the Getty Research Institute, which will also receive a selection of rare Viennese books, portfolios and prints that Kallir published.
A significant portion of the Kallir gift is composed of works on paper, which will be housed at LACMA’s Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies under the care of curator Timothy O. Benson. Benson is curating a show featuring 24 works from the gift, titled “Austrian Expressionism and Otto Kallir,” which will open Nov. 23 and run through May 31, 2026.
“German expressionism has always been something of an outlier in terms of American museum exhibition and collecting priorities,” Jane Kallir said. “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.”
Quite a bit of that scholarship has been done by Stephanie Barron, senior curator and head of modern art at LACMA, who has spent decades building her knowledge in the field by contributing to arts periodicals and books as well as staging exhibitions, including “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), among others.
Barron noted that L.A. has a long history of attracting accomplished Viennese emigres, including Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra, and that in the late 1930s and ’40s, a new wave of artists, actors, writers and thinkers who were fleeing the Nazis helped seed a thriving Austrian community in Southern California.
LACMA’s strength up until now, however, was German Expressionism, Barron said, adding that the museum’s collection 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,” said 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 will be crated and shipped in waves. The first group contains an exquisite 1897 Klimt portrait, titled “Woman With Fur Collar,” that Barron described as “small but mighty.”
Also of note: two Schiele landscapes that Jane Kallir called “blockbusters.”
“Sawmill” by Egon Schiele, 1913.
(Kallir Research Institute, New York)
“They are both seminal works from a key period in the artist’s life,” Jane Kallir said. “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 Kallir said.
Elevating and studying Schiele is something that occupied both Jane Kallir and her grandfather over the course of their professional careers, she said.
When Kallir fled the Nazis in 1938, immediately after the annexation of Austria, he had no problem taking Schiele paintings, watercolors and drawings out of Austria “because the Nazis considered Schiele degenerate,” Jane Kallir said. The artist also had no international value. This became a problem once Kallir got to New York because he couldn’t sell anything.
Kallir held Schiele’s first one-person show in 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 really amazing, Jane Kallir said, to compare that moment to Schiele’s reputation today. Fortunately for Angelenos, some of that work will soon be on view.
More than 100 works of Austrian Expressionism are being gifted to Los Angeles County Museum of Art by the family of Otto Kallir, a renowned art dealer who immigrated to America in 1938 after the German Reich annexed Austria. The art will be transferred to LACMA over the next several years and includes the museum’s first paintings by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Richard Gerstl.
The gift also includes paintings, drawings, prints and posters from Alfred Kubin, Oskar Kokoschka and Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, as well as German artists Lovis Corinth and Käthe Kollwitz. The news comes two months after LACMA was gifted its first paintings by Vincent van Gogh and Édouard Manet by the Pearlman Foundation, which is dividing its celebrated collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Modernist art among three museums.
In 1939, Kallir founded Galerie St. Etienne in New York, which became instrumental in establishing Austrian Expressionism in America, said Kallir’s granddaughter Jane Kallir. Jane Kallir took over the gallery with Kallir’s business partner, Hildegard Bachert, after Kallir’s death in 1978, and ran it for 40 years before launching the Kallir Research Institute.
Austrian Expressionists, including masters like Klimt and Schiele, “had no reputation outside of Austria then,” Jane Kallir told The Times, adding that Kallir built them up “by collaborating with museums and donating to museums.”
When Kallir died and Jane Kallir surveyed the work he left behind, she began thinking that if finances allowed, she’d like to one day complete her grandfather’s mission.
“Self Portrait With Brown Background” by Egon Schiele, 1912.
(Kallir Research Institute, New York)
In recent years, she happily realized she would be able to do just that. The question of where to donate the art came next, and Jane Kallir said there weren’t many places that came into play when she was looking for institutions with a long-standing commitment to Germanic modernism. For this reason, it soon became clear that LACMA was the answer, alongside the Getty Research Institute, which will also receive a selection of rare Viennese books, portfolios and prints that Kallir published.
A significant portion of the Kallir gift is composed of works on paper, which will be housed at LACMA’s Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies under the care of curator Timothy O. Benson. Benson is curating a show featuring 24 works from the gift, titled “Austrian Expressionism and Otto Kallir,” which will open Nov. 23 and run through May 31, 2026.
“German expressionism has always been something of an outlier in terms of American museum exhibition and collecting priorities,” Jane Kallir said. “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.”
Quite a bit of that scholarship has been done by Stephanie Barron, senior curator and head of modern art at LACMA, who has spent decades building her knowledge in the field by contributing to arts periodicals and books as well as staging exhibitions, including “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), among others.
Barron noted that L.A. has a long history of attracting accomplished Viennese emigres, including Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra, and that in the late 1930s and ’40s, a new wave of artists, actors, writers and thinkers who were fleeing the Nazis helped seed a thriving Austrian community in Southern California.
LACMA’s strength up until now, however, was German Expressionism, Barron said, adding that the museum’s collection 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,” said 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 will be crated and shipped in waves. The first group contains an exquisite 1897 Klimt portrait, titled “Woman With Fur Collar,” that Barron described as “small but mighty.”
Also of note: two Schiele landscapes that Jane Kallir called “blockbusters.”
“Sawmill” by Egon Schiele, 1913.
(Kallir Research Institute, New York)
“They are both seminal works from a key period in the artist’s life,” Jane Kallir said. “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 Kallir said.
Elevating and studying Schiele is something that occupied both Jane Kallir and her grandfather over the course of their professional careers, she said.
When Kallir fled the Nazis in 1938, immediately after the annexation of Austria, he had no problem taking Schiele paintings, watercolors and drawings out of Austria “because the Nazis considered Schiele degenerate,” Jane Kallir said. The artist also had no international value. This became a problem once Kallir got to New York because he couldn’t sell anything.
Kallir held Schiele’s first one-person show in 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 really amazing, Jane Kallir said, to compare that moment to Schiele’s reputation today. Fortunately for Angelenos, some of that work will soon be on view.
More than 100 works of Austrian Expressionism are being gifted to Los Angeles County Museum of Art by the family of Otto Kallir, a renowned art dealer who immigrated to America in 1938 after the German Reich annexed Austria. The art will be transferred to LACMA over the next several years and includes the museum’s first paintings by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Richard Gerstl.
The gift also includes paintings, drawings, prints and posters from Alfred Kubin, Oskar Kokoschka and Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, as well as German artists Lovis Corinth and Käthe Kollwitz. The news comes two months after LACMA was gifted its first paintings by Vincent van Gogh and Édouard Manet by the Pearlman Foundation, which is dividing its celebrated collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Modernist art among three museums.
In 1939, Kallir founded Galerie St. Etienne in New York, which became instrumental in establishing Austrian Expressionism in America, said Kallir’s granddaughter Jane Kallir. Jane Kallir took over the gallery with Kallir’s business partner, Hildegard Bachert, after Kallir’s death in 1978, and ran it for 40 years before launching the Kallir Research Institute.
Austrian Expressionists, including masters like Klimt and Schiele, “had no reputation outside of Austria then,” Jane Kallir told The Times, adding that Kallir built them up “by collaborating with museums and donating to museums.”
When Kallir died and Jane Kallir surveyed the work he left behind, she began thinking that if finances allowed, she’d like to one day complete her grandfather’s mission.
“Self Portrait With Brown Background” by Egon Schiele, 1912.
(Kallir Research Institute, New York)
In recent years, she happily realized she would be able to do just that. The question of where to donate the art came next, and Jane Kallir said there weren’t many places that came into play when she was looking for institutions with a long-standing commitment to Germanic modernism. For this reason, it soon became clear that LACMA was the answer, alongside the Getty Research Institute, which will also receive a selection of rare Viennese books, portfolios and prints that Kallir published.
A significant portion of the Kallir gift is composed of works on paper, which will be housed at LACMA’s Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies under the care of curator Timothy O. Benson. Benson is curating a show featuring 24 works from the gift, titled “Austrian Expressionism and Otto Kallir,” which will open Nov. 23 and run through May 31, 2026.
“German expressionism has always been something of an outlier in terms of American museum exhibition and collecting priorities,” Jane Kallir said. “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.”
Quite a bit of that scholarship has been done by Stephanie Barron, senior curator and head of modern art at LACMA, who has spent decades building her knowledge in the field by contributing to arts periodicals and books as well as staging exhibitions, including “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), among others.
Barron noted that L.A. has a long history of attracting accomplished Viennese emigres, including Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra, and that in the late 1930s and ’40s, a new wave of artists, actors, writers and thinkers who were fleeing the Nazis helped seed a thriving Austrian community in Southern California.
LACMA’s strength up until now, however, was German Expressionism, Barron said, adding that the museum’s collection 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,” said 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 will be crated and shipped in waves. The first group contains an exquisite 1897 Klimt portrait, titled “Woman With Fur Collar,” that Barron described as “small but mighty.”
Also of note: two Schiele landscapes that Jane Kallir called “blockbusters.”
“Sawmill” by Egon Schiele, 1913.
(Kallir Research Institute, New York)
“They are both seminal works from a key period in the artist’s life,” Jane Kallir said. “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 Kallir said.
Elevating and studying Schiele is something that occupied both Jane Kallir and her grandfather over the course of their professional careers, she said.
When Kallir fled the Nazis in 1938, immediately after the annexation of Austria, he had no problem taking Schiele paintings, watercolors and drawings out of Austria “because the Nazis considered Schiele degenerate,” Jane Kallir said. The artist also had no international value. This became a problem once Kallir got to New York because he couldn’t sell anything.
Kallir held Schiele’s first one-person show in 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 really amazing, Jane Kallir said, to compare that moment to Schiele’s reputation today. Fortunately for Angelenos, some of that work will soon be on view.
More than 100 works of Austrian Expressionism are being gifted to Los Angeles County Museum of Art by the family of Otto Kallir, a renowned art dealer who immigrated to America in 1938 after the German Reich annexed Austria. The art will be transferred to LACMA over the next several years and includes the museum’s first paintings by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Richard Gerstl.
The gift also includes paintings, drawings, prints and posters from Alfred Kubin, Oskar Kokoschka and Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, as well as German artists Lovis Corinth and Käthe Kollwitz. The news comes two months after LACMA was gifted its first paintings by Vincent van Gogh and Édouard Manet by the Pearlman Foundation, which is dividing its celebrated collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Modernist art among three museums.
In 1939, Kallir founded Galerie St. Etienne in New York, which became instrumental in establishing Austrian Expressionism in America, said Kallir’s granddaughter Jane Kallir. Jane Kallir took over the gallery with Kallir’s business partner, Hildegard Bachert, after Kallir’s death in 1978, and ran it for 40 years before launching the Kallir Research Institute.
Austrian Expressionists, including masters like Klimt and Schiele, “had no reputation outside of Austria then,” Jane Kallir told The Times, adding that Kallir built them up “by collaborating with museums and donating to museums.”
When Kallir died and Jane Kallir surveyed the work he left behind, she began thinking that if finances allowed, she’d like to one day complete her grandfather’s mission.
“Self Portrait With Brown Background” by Egon Schiele, 1912.
(Kallir Research Institute, New York)
In recent years, she happily realized she would be able to do just that. The question of where to donate the art came next, and Jane Kallir said there weren’t many places that came into play when she was looking for institutions with a long-standing commitment to Germanic modernism. For this reason, it soon became clear that LACMA was the answer, alongside the Getty Research Institute, which will also receive a selection of rare Viennese books, portfolios and prints that Kallir published.
A significant portion of the Kallir gift is composed of works on paper, which will be housed at LACMA’s Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies under the care of curator Timothy O. Benson. Benson is curating a show featuring 24 works from the gift, titled “Austrian Expressionism and Otto Kallir,” which will open Nov. 23 and run through May 31, 2026.
“German expressionism has always been something of an outlier in terms of American museum exhibition and collecting priorities,” Jane Kallir said. “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.”
Quite a bit of that scholarship has been done by Stephanie Barron, senior curator and head of modern art at LACMA, who has spent decades building her knowledge in the field by contributing to arts periodicals and books as well as staging exhibitions, including “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), among others.
Barron noted that L.A. has a long history of attracting accomplished Viennese emigres, including Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra, and that in the late 1930s and ’40s, a new wave of artists, actors, writers and thinkers who were fleeing the Nazis helped seed a thriving Austrian community in Southern California.
LACMA’s strength up until now, however, was German Expressionism, Barron said, adding that the museum’s collection 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,” said 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 will be crated and shipped in waves. The first group contains an exquisite 1897 Klimt portrait, titled “Woman With Fur Collar,” that Barron described as “small but mighty.”
Also of note: two Schiele landscapes that Jane Kallir called “blockbusters.”
“Sawmill” by Egon Schiele, 1913.
(Kallir Research Institute, New York)
“They are both seminal works from a key period in the artist’s life,” Jane Kallir said. “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 Kallir said.
Elevating and studying Schiele is something that occupied both Jane Kallir and her grandfather over the course of their professional careers, she said.
When Kallir fled the Nazis in 1938, immediately after the annexation of Austria, he had no problem taking Schiele paintings, watercolors and drawings out of Austria “because the Nazis considered Schiele degenerate,” Jane Kallir said. The artist also had no international value. This became a problem once Kallir got to New York because he couldn’t sell anything.
Kallir held Schiele’s first one-person show in 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 really amazing, Jane Kallir said, to compare that moment to Schiele’s reputation today. Fortunately for Angelenos, some of that work will soon be on view.
More than 100 works of Austrian Expressionism are being gifted to Los Angeles County Museum of Art by the family of Otto Kallir, a renowned art dealer who immigrated to America in 1938 after the German Reich annexed Austria. The art will be transferred to LACMA over the next several years and includes the museum’s first paintings by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Richard Gerstl.
The gift also includes paintings, drawings, prints and posters from Alfred Kubin, Oskar Kokoschka and Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, as well as German artists Lovis Corinth and Käthe Kollwitz. The news comes two months after LACMA was gifted its first paintings by Vincent van Gogh and Édouard Manet by the Pearlman Foundation, which is dividing its celebrated collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Modernist art among three museums.
In 1939, Kallir founded Galerie St. Etienne in New York, which became instrumental in establishing Austrian Expressionism in America, said Kallir’s granddaughter Jane Kallir. Jane Kallir took over the gallery with Kallir’s business partner, Hildegard Bachert, after Kallir’s death in 1978, and ran it for 40 years before launching the Kallir Research Institute.
Austrian Expressionists, including masters like Klimt and Schiele, “had no reputation outside of Austria then,” Jane Kallir told The Times, adding that Kallir built them up “by collaborating with museums and donating to museums.”
When Kallir died and Jane Kallir surveyed the work he left behind, she began thinking that if finances allowed, she’d like to one day complete her grandfather’s mission.
“Self Portrait With Brown Background” by Egon Schiele, 1912.
(Kallir Research Institute, New York)
In recent years, she happily realized she would be able to do just that. The question of where to donate the art came next, and Jane Kallir said there weren’t many places that came into play when she was looking for institutions with a long-standing commitment to Germanic modernism. For this reason, it soon became clear that LACMA was the answer, alongside the Getty Research Institute, which will also receive a selection of rare Viennese books, portfolios and prints that Kallir published.
A significant portion of the Kallir gift is composed of works on paper, which will be housed at LACMA’s Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies under the care of curator Timothy O. Benson. Benson is curating a show featuring 24 works from the gift, titled “Austrian Expressionism and Otto Kallir,” which will open Nov. 23 and run through May 31, 2026.
“German expressionism has always been something of an outlier in terms of American museum exhibition and collecting priorities,” Jane Kallir said. “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.”
Quite a bit of that scholarship has been done by Stephanie Barron, senior curator and head of modern art at LACMA, who has spent decades building her knowledge in the field by contributing to arts periodicals and books as well as staging exhibitions, including “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), among others.
Barron noted that L.A. has a long history of attracting accomplished Viennese emigres, including Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra, and that in the late 1930s and ’40s, a new wave of artists, actors, writers and thinkers who were fleeing the Nazis helped seed a thriving Austrian community in Southern California.
LACMA’s strength up until now, however, was German Expressionism, Barron said, adding that the museum’s collection 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,” said 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 will be crated and shipped in waves. The first group contains an exquisite 1897 Klimt portrait, titled “Woman With Fur Collar,” that Barron described as “small but mighty.”
Also of note: two Schiele landscapes that Jane Kallir called “blockbusters.”
“Sawmill” by Egon Schiele, 1913.
(Kallir Research Institute, New York)
“They are both seminal works from a key period in the artist’s life,” Jane Kallir said. “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 Kallir said.
Elevating and studying Schiele is something that occupied both Jane Kallir and her grandfather over the course of their professional careers, she said.
When Kallir fled the Nazis in 1938, immediately after the annexation of Austria, he had no problem taking Schiele paintings, watercolors and drawings out of Austria “because the Nazis considered Schiele degenerate,” Jane Kallir said. The artist also had no international value. This became a problem once Kallir got to New York because he couldn’t sell anything.
Kallir held Schiele’s first one-person show in 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 really amazing, Jane Kallir said, to compare that moment to Schiele’s reputation today. Fortunately for Angelenos, some of that work will soon be on view.
More than 100 works of Austrian Expressionism are being gifted to Los Angeles County Museum of Art by the family of Otto Kallir, a renowned art dealer who immigrated to America in 1938 after the German Reich annexed Austria. The art will be transferred to LACMA over the next several years and includes the museum’s first paintings by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Richard Gerstl.
The gift also includes paintings, drawings, prints and posters from Alfred Kubin, Oskar Kokoschka and Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, as well as German artists Lovis Corinth and Käthe Kollwitz. The news comes two months after LACMA was gifted its first paintings by Vincent van Gogh and Édouard Manet by the Pearlman Foundation, which is dividing its celebrated collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Modernist art among three museums.
In 1939, Kallir founded Galerie St. Etienne in New York, which became instrumental in establishing Austrian Expressionism in America, said Kallir’s granddaughter Jane Kallir. Jane Kallir took over the gallery with Kallir’s business partner, Hildegard Bachert, after Kallir’s death in 1978, and ran it for 40 years before launching the Kallir Research Institute.
Austrian Expressionists, including masters like Klimt and Schiele, “had no reputation outside of Austria then,” Jane Kallir told The Times, adding that Kallir built them up “by collaborating with museums and donating to museums.”
When Kallir died and Jane Kallir surveyed the work he left behind, she began thinking that if finances allowed, she’d like to one day complete her grandfather’s mission.
“Self Portrait With Brown Background” by Egon Schiele, 1912.
(Kallir Research Institute, New York)
In recent years, she happily realized she would be able to do just that. The question of where to donate the art came next, and Jane Kallir said there weren’t many places that came into play when she was looking for institutions with a long-standing commitment to Germanic modernism. For this reason, it soon became clear that LACMA was the answer, alongside the Getty Research Institute, which will also receive a selection of rare Viennese books, portfolios and prints that Kallir published.
A significant portion of the Kallir gift is composed of works on paper, which will be housed at LACMA’s Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies under the care of curator Timothy O. Benson. Benson is curating a show featuring 24 works from the gift, titled “Austrian Expressionism and Otto Kallir,” which will open Nov. 23 and run through May 31, 2026.
“German expressionism has always been something of an outlier in terms of American museum exhibition and collecting priorities,” Jane Kallir said. “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.”
Quite a bit of that scholarship has been done by Stephanie Barron, senior curator and head of modern art at LACMA, who has spent decades building her knowledge in the field by contributing to arts periodicals and books as well as staging exhibitions, including “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), among others.
Barron noted that L.A. has a long history of attracting accomplished Viennese emigres, including Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra, and that in the late 1930s and ’40s, a new wave of artists, actors, writers and thinkers who were fleeing the Nazis helped seed a thriving Austrian community in Southern California.
LACMA’s strength up until now, however, was German Expressionism, Barron said, adding that the museum’s collection 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,” said 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 will be crated and shipped in waves. The first group contains an exquisite 1897 Klimt portrait, titled “Woman With Fur Collar,” that Barron described as “small but mighty.”
Also of note: two Schiele landscapes that Jane Kallir called “blockbusters.”
“Sawmill” by Egon Schiele, 1913.
(Kallir Research Institute, New York)
“They are both seminal works from a key period in the artist’s life,” Jane Kallir said. “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 Kallir said.
Elevating and studying Schiele is something that occupied both Jane Kallir and her grandfather over the course of their professional careers, she said.
When Kallir fled the Nazis in 1938, immediately after the annexation of Austria, he had no problem taking Schiele paintings, watercolors and drawings out of Austria “because the Nazis considered Schiele degenerate,” Jane Kallir said. The artist also had no international value. This became a problem once Kallir got to New York because he couldn’t sell anything.
Kallir held Schiele’s first one-person show in 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 really amazing, Jane Kallir said, to compare that moment to Schiele’s reputation today. Fortunately for Angelenos, some of that work will soon be on view.
More than 100 works of Austrian Expressionism are being gifted to Los Angeles County Museum of Art by the family of Otto Kallir, a renowned art dealer who immigrated to America in 1938 after the German Reich annexed Austria. The art will be transferred to LACMA over the next several years and includes the museum’s first paintings by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Richard Gerstl.
The gift also includes paintings, drawings, prints and posters from Alfred Kubin, Oskar Kokoschka and Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, as well as German artists Lovis Corinth and Käthe Kollwitz. The news comes two months after LACMA was gifted its first paintings by Vincent van Gogh and Édouard Manet by the Pearlman Foundation, which is dividing its celebrated collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Modernist art among three museums.
In 1939, Kallir founded Galerie St. Etienne in New York, which became instrumental in establishing Austrian Expressionism in America, said Kallir’s granddaughter Jane Kallir. Jane Kallir took over the gallery with Kallir’s business partner, Hildegard Bachert, after Kallir’s death in 1978, and ran it for 40 years before launching the Kallir Research Institute.
Austrian Expressionists, including masters like Klimt and Schiele, “had no reputation outside of Austria then,” Jane Kallir told The Times, adding that Kallir built them up “by collaborating with museums and donating to museums.”
When Kallir died and Jane Kallir surveyed the work he left behind, she began thinking that if finances allowed, she’d like to one day complete her grandfather’s mission.
“Self Portrait With Brown Background” by Egon Schiele, 1912.
(Kallir Research Institute, New York)
In recent years, she happily realized she would be able to do just that. The question of where to donate the art came next, and Jane Kallir said there weren’t many places that came into play when she was looking for institutions with a long-standing commitment to Germanic modernism. For this reason, it soon became clear that LACMA was the answer, alongside the Getty Research Institute, which will also receive a selection of rare Viennese books, portfolios and prints that Kallir published.
A significant portion of the Kallir gift is composed of works on paper, which will be housed at LACMA’s Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies under the care of curator Timothy O. Benson. Benson is curating a show featuring 24 works from the gift, titled “Austrian Expressionism and Otto Kallir,” which will open Nov. 23 and run through May 31, 2026.
“German expressionism has always been something of an outlier in terms of American museum exhibition and collecting priorities,” Jane Kallir said. “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.”
Quite a bit of that scholarship has been done by Stephanie Barron, senior curator and head of modern art at LACMA, who has spent decades building her knowledge in the field by contributing to arts periodicals and books as well as staging exhibitions, including “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), among others.
Barron noted that L.A. has a long history of attracting accomplished Viennese emigres, including Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra, and that in the late 1930s and ’40s, a new wave of artists, actors, writers and thinkers who were fleeing the Nazis helped seed a thriving Austrian community in Southern California.
LACMA’s strength up until now, however, was German Expressionism, Barron said, adding that the museum’s collection 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,” said 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 will be crated and shipped in waves. The first group contains an exquisite 1897 Klimt portrait, titled “Woman With Fur Collar,” that Barron described as “small but mighty.”
Also of note: two Schiele landscapes that Jane Kallir called “blockbusters.”
“Sawmill” by Egon Schiele, 1913.
(Kallir Research Institute, New York)
“They are both seminal works from a key period in the artist’s life,” Jane Kallir said. “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 Kallir said.
Elevating and studying Schiele is something that occupied both Jane Kallir and her grandfather over the course of their professional careers, she said.
When Kallir fled the Nazis in 1938, immediately after the annexation of Austria, he had no problem taking Schiele paintings, watercolors and drawings out of Austria “because the Nazis considered Schiele degenerate,” Jane Kallir said. The artist also had no international value. This became a problem once Kallir got to New York because he couldn’t sell anything.
Kallir held Schiele’s first one-person show in 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 really amazing, Jane Kallir said, to compare that moment to Schiele’s reputation today. Fortunately for Angelenos, some of that work will soon be on view.
More than 100 works of Austrian Expressionism are being gifted to Los Angeles County Museum of Art by the family of Otto Kallir, a renowned art dealer who immigrated to America in 1938 after the German Reich annexed Austria. The art will be transferred to LACMA over the next several years and includes the museum’s first paintings by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Richard Gerstl.
The gift also includes paintings, drawings, prints and posters from Alfred Kubin, Oskar Kokoschka and Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, as well as German artists Lovis Corinth and Käthe Kollwitz. The news comes two months after LACMA was gifted its first paintings by Vincent van Gogh and Édouard Manet by the Pearlman Foundation, which is dividing its celebrated collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Modernist art among three museums.
In 1939, Kallir founded Galerie St. Etienne in New York, which became instrumental in establishing Austrian Expressionism in America, said Kallir’s granddaughter Jane Kallir. Jane Kallir took over the gallery with Kallir’s business partner, Hildegard Bachert, after Kallir’s death in 1978, and ran it for 40 years before launching the Kallir Research Institute.
Austrian Expressionists, including masters like Klimt and Schiele, “had no reputation outside of Austria then,” Jane Kallir told The Times, adding that Kallir built them up “by collaborating with museums and donating to museums.”
When Kallir died and Jane Kallir surveyed the work he left behind, she began thinking that if finances allowed, she’d like to one day complete her grandfather’s mission.
“Self Portrait With Brown Background” by Egon Schiele, 1912.
(Kallir Research Institute, New York)
In recent years, she happily realized she would be able to do just that. The question of where to donate the art came next, and Jane Kallir said there weren’t many places that came into play when she was looking for institutions with a long-standing commitment to Germanic modernism. For this reason, it soon became clear that LACMA was the answer, alongside the Getty Research Institute, which will also receive a selection of rare Viennese books, portfolios and prints that Kallir published.
A significant portion of the Kallir gift is composed of works on paper, which will be housed at LACMA’s Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies under the care of curator Timothy O. Benson. Benson is curating a show featuring 24 works from the gift, titled “Austrian Expressionism and Otto Kallir,” which will open Nov. 23 and run through May 31, 2026.
“German expressionism has always been something of an outlier in terms of American museum exhibition and collecting priorities,” Jane Kallir said. “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.”
Quite a bit of that scholarship has been done by Stephanie Barron, senior curator and head of modern art at LACMA, who has spent decades building her knowledge in the field by contributing to arts periodicals and books as well as staging exhibitions, including “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), among others.
Barron noted that L.A. has a long history of attracting accomplished Viennese emigres, including Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra, and that in the late 1930s and ’40s, a new wave of artists, actors, writers and thinkers who were fleeing the Nazis helped seed a thriving Austrian community in Southern California.
LACMA’s strength up until now, however, was German Expressionism, Barron said, adding that the museum’s collection 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,” said 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 will be crated and shipped in waves. The first group contains an exquisite 1897 Klimt portrait, titled “Woman With Fur Collar,” that Barron described as “small but mighty.”
Also of note: two Schiele landscapes that Jane Kallir called “blockbusters.”
“Sawmill” by Egon Schiele, 1913.
(Kallir Research Institute, New York)
“They are both seminal works from a key period in the artist’s life,” Jane Kallir said. “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 Kallir said.
Elevating and studying Schiele is something that occupied both Jane Kallir and her grandfather over the course of their professional careers, she said.
When Kallir fled the Nazis in 1938, immediately after the annexation of Austria, he had no problem taking Schiele paintings, watercolors and drawings out of Austria “because the Nazis considered Schiele degenerate,” Jane Kallir said. The artist also had no international value. This became a problem once Kallir got to New York because he couldn’t sell anything.
Kallir held Schiele’s first one-person show in 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 really amazing, Jane Kallir said, to compare that moment to Schiele’s reputation today. Fortunately for Angelenos, some of that work will soon be on view.
More than 100 works of Austrian Expressionism are being gifted to Los Angeles County Museum of Art by the family of Otto Kallir, a renowned art dealer who immigrated to America in 1938 after the German Reich annexed Austria. The art will be transferred to LACMA over the next several years and includes the museum’s first paintings by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Richard Gerstl.
The gift also includes paintings, drawings, prints and posters from Alfred Kubin, Oskar Kokoschka and Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, as well as German artists Lovis Corinth and Käthe Kollwitz. The news comes two months after LACMA was gifted its first paintings by Vincent van Gogh and Édouard Manet by the Pearlman Foundation, which is dividing its celebrated collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Modernist art among three museums.
In 1939, Kallir founded Galerie St. Etienne in New York, which became instrumental in establishing Austrian Expressionism in America, said Kallir’s granddaughter Jane Kallir. Jane Kallir took over the gallery with Kallir’s business partner, Hildegard Bachert, after Kallir’s death in 1978, and ran it for 40 years before launching the Kallir Research Institute.
Austrian Expressionists, including masters like Klimt and Schiele, “had no reputation outside of Austria then,” Jane Kallir told The Times, adding that Kallir built them up “by collaborating with museums and donating to museums.”
When Kallir died and Jane Kallir surveyed the work he left behind, she began thinking that if finances allowed, she’d like to one day complete her grandfather’s mission.
“Self Portrait With Brown Background” by Egon Schiele, 1912.
(Kallir Research Institute, New York)
In recent years, she happily realized she would be able to do just that. The question of where to donate the art came next, and Jane Kallir said there weren’t many places that came into play when she was looking for institutions with a long-standing commitment to Germanic modernism. For this reason, it soon became clear that LACMA was the answer, alongside the Getty Research Institute, which will also receive a selection of rare Viennese books, portfolios and prints that Kallir published.
A significant portion of the Kallir gift is composed of works on paper, which will be housed at LACMA’s Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies under the care of curator Timothy O. Benson. Benson is curating a show featuring 24 works from the gift, titled “Austrian Expressionism and Otto Kallir,” which will open Nov. 23 and run through May 31, 2026.
“German expressionism has always been something of an outlier in terms of American museum exhibition and collecting priorities,” Jane Kallir said. “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.”
Quite a bit of that scholarship has been done by Stephanie Barron, senior curator and head of modern art at LACMA, who has spent decades building her knowledge in the field by contributing to arts periodicals and books as well as staging exhibitions, including “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), among others.
Barron noted that L.A. has a long history of attracting accomplished Viennese emigres, including Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra, and that in the late 1930s and ’40s, a new wave of artists, actors, writers and thinkers who were fleeing the Nazis helped seed a thriving Austrian community in Southern California.
LACMA’s strength up until now, however, was German Expressionism, Barron said, adding that the museum’s collection 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,” said 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 will be crated and shipped in waves. The first group contains an exquisite 1897 Klimt portrait, titled “Woman With Fur Collar,” that Barron described as “small but mighty.”
Also of note: two Schiele landscapes that Jane Kallir called “blockbusters.”
“Sawmill” by Egon Schiele, 1913.
(Kallir Research Institute, New York)
“They are both seminal works from a key period in the artist’s life,” Jane Kallir said. “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 Kallir said.
Elevating and studying Schiele is something that occupied both Jane Kallir and her grandfather over the course of their professional careers, she said.
When Kallir fled the Nazis in 1938, immediately after the annexation of Austria, he had no problem taking Schiele paintings, watercolors and drawings out of Austria “because the Nazis considered Schiele degenerate,” Jane Kallir said. The artist also had no international value. This became a problem once Kallir got to New York because he couldn’t sell anything.
Kallir held Schiele’s first one-person show in 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 really amazing, Jane Kallir said, to compare that moment to Schiele’s reputation today. Fortunately for Angelenos, some of that work will soon be on view.
More than 100 works of Austrian Expressionism are being gifted to Los Angeles County Museum of Art by the family of Otto Kallir, a renowned art dealer who immigrated to America in 1938 after the German Reich annexed Austria. The art will be transferred to LACMA over the next several years and includes the museum’s first paintings by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Richard Gerstl.
The gift also includes paintings, drawings, prints and posters from Alfred Kubin, Oskar Kokoschka and Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, as well as German artists Lovis Corinth and Käthe Kollwitz. The news comes two months after LACMA was gifted its first paintings by Vincent van Gogh and Édouard Manet by the Pearlman Foundation, which is dividing its celebrated collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Modernist art among three museums.
In 1939, Kallir founded Galerie St. Etienne in New York, which became instrumental in establishing Austrian Expressionism in America, said Kallir’s granddaughter Jane Kallir. Jane Kallir took over the gallery with Kallir’s business partner, Hildegard Bachert, after Kallir’s death in 1978, and ran it for 40 years before launching the Kallir Research Institute.
Austrian Expressionists, including masters like Klimt and Schiele, “had no reputation outside of Austria then,” Jane Kallir told The Times, adding that Kallir built them up “by collaborating with museums and donating to museums.”
When Kallir died and Jane Kallir surveyed the work he left behind, she began thinking that if finances allowed, she’d like to one day complete her grandfather’s mission.
“Self Portrait With Brown Background” by Egon Schiele, 1912.
(Kallir Research Institute, New York)
In recent years, she happily realized she would be able to do just that. The question of where to donate the art came next, and Jane Kallir said there weren’t many places that came into play when she was looking for institutions with a long-standing commitment to Germanic modernism. For this reason, it soon became clear that LACMA was the answer, alongside the Getty Research Institute, which will also receive a selection of rare Viennese books, portfolios and prints that Kallir published.
A significant portion of the Kallir gift is composed of works on paper, which will be housed at LACMA’s Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies under the care of curator Timothy O. Benson. Benson is curating a show featuring 24 works from the gift, titled “Austrian Expressionism and Otto Kallir,” which will open Nov. 23 and run through May 31, 2026.
“German expressionism has always been something of an outlier in terms of American museum exhibition and collecting priorities,” Jane Kallir said. “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.”
Quite a bit of that scholarship has been done by Stephanie Barron, senior curator and head of modern art at LACMA, who has spent decades building her knowledge in the field by contributing to arts periodicals and books as well as staging exhibitions, including “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), among others.
Barron noted that L.A. has a long history of attracting accomplished Viennese emigres, including Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra, and that in the late 1930s and ’40s, a new wave of artists, actors, writers and thinkers who were fleeing the Nazis helped seed a thriving Austrian community in Southern California.
LACMA’s strength up until now, however, was German Expressionism, Barron said, adding that the museum’s collection 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,” said 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 will be crated and shipped in waves. The first group contains an exquisite 1897 Klimt portrait, titled “Woman With Fur Collar,” that Barron described as “small but mighty.”
Also of note: two Schiele landscapes that Jane Kallir called “blockbusters.”
“Sawmill” by Egon Schiele, 1913.
(Kallir Research Institute, New York)
“They are both seminal works from a key period in the artist’s life,” Jane Kallir said. “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 Kallir said.
Elevating and studying Schiele is something that occupied both Jane Kallir and her grandfather over the course of their professional careers, she said.
When Kallir fled the Nazis in 1938, immediately after the annexation of Austria, he had no problem taking Schiele paintings, watercolors and drawings out of Austria “because the Nazis considered Schiele degenerate,” Jane Kallir said. The artist also had no international value. This became a problem once Kallir got to New York because he couldn’t sell anything.
Kallir held Schiele’s first one-person show in 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 really amazing, Jane Kallir said, to compare that moment to Schiele’s reputation today. Fortunately for Angelenos, some of that work will soon be on view.
More than 100 works of Austrian Expressionism are being gifted to Los Angeles County Museum of Art by the family of Otto Kallir, a renowned art dealer who immigrated to America in 1938 after the German Reich annexed Austria. The art will be transferred to LACMA over the next several years and includes the museum’s first paintings by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Richard Gerstl.
The gift also includes paintings, drawings, prints and posters from Alfred Kubin, Oskar Kokoschka and Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, as well as German artists Lovis Corinth and Käthe Kollwitz. The news comes two months after LACMA was gifted its first paintings by Vincent van Gogh and Édouard Manet by the Pearlman Foundation, which is dividing its celebrated collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Modernist art among three museums.
In 1939, Kallir founded Galerie St. Etienne in New York, which became instrumental in establishing Austrian Expressionism in America, said Kallir’s granddaughter Jane Kallir. Jane Kallir took over the gallery with Kallir’s business partner, Hildegard Bachert, after Kallir’s death in 1978, and ran it for 40 years before launching the Kallir Research Institute.
Austrian Expressionists, including masters like Klimt and Schiele, “had no reputation outside of Austria then,” Jane Kallir told The Times, adding that Kallir built them up “by collaborating with museums and donating to museums.”
When Kallir died and Jane Kallir surveyed the work he left behind, she began thinking that if finances allowed, she’d like to one day complete her grandfather’s mission.
“Self Portrait With Brown Background” by Egon Schiele, 1912.
(Kallir Research Institute, New York)
In recent years, she happily realized she would be able to do just that. The question of where to donate the art came next, and Jane Kallir said there weren’t many places that came into play when she was looking for institutions with a long-standing commitment to Germanic modernism. For this reason, it soon became clear that LACMA was the answer, alongside the Getty Research Institute, which will also receive a selection of rare Viennese books, portfolios and prints that Kallir published.
A significant portion of the Kallir gift is composed of works on paper, which will be housed at LACMA’s Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies under the care of curator Timothy O. Benson. Benson is curating a show featuring 24 works from the gift, titled “Austrian Expressionism and Otto Kallir,” which will open Nov. 23 and run through May 31, 2026.
“German expressionism has always been something of an outlier in terms of American museum exhibition and collecting priorities,” Jane Kallir said. “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.”
Quite a bit of that scholarship has been done by Stephanie Barron, senior curator and head of modern art at LACMA, who has spent decades building her knowledge in the field by contributing to arts periodicals and books as well as staging exhibitions, including “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), among others.
Barron noted that L.A. has a long history of attracting accomplished Viennese emigres, including Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra, and that in the late 1930s and ’40s, a new wave of artists, actors, writers and thinkers who were fleeing the Nazis helped seed a thriving Austrian community in Southern California.
LACMA’s strength up until now, however, was German Expressionism, Barron said, adding that the museum’s collection 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,” said 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 will be crated and shipped in waves. The first group contains an exquisite 1897 Klimt portrait, titled “Woman With Fur Collar,” that Barron described as “small but mighty.”
Also of note: two Schiele landscapes that Jane Kallir called “blockbusters.”
“Sawmill” by Egon Schiele, 1913.
(Kallir Research Institute, New York)
“They are both seminal works from a key period in the artist’s life,” Jane Kallir said. “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 Kallir said.
Elevating and studying Schiele is something that occupied both Jane Kallir and her grandfather over the course of their professional careers, she said.
When Kallir fled the Nazis in 1938, immediately after the annexation of Austria, he had no problem taking Schiele paintings, watercolors and drawings out of Austria “because the Nazis considered Schiele degenerate,” Jane Kallir said. The artist also had no international value. This became a problem once Kallir got to New York because he couldn’t sell anything.
Kallir held Schiele’s first one-person show in 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 really amazing, Jane Kallir said, to compare that moment to Schiele’s reputation today. Fortunately for Angelenos, some of that work will soon be on view.
More than 100 works of Austrian Expressionism are being gifted to Los Angeles County Museum of Art by the family of Otto Kallir, a renowned art dealer who immigrated to America in 1938 after the German Reich annexed Austria. The art will be transferred to LACMA over the next several years and includes the museum’s first paintings by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Richard Gerstl.
The gift also includes paintings, drawings, prints and posters from Alfred Kubin, Oskar Kokoschka and Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, as well as German artists Lovis Corinth and Käthe Kollwitz. The news comes two months after LACMA was gifted its first paintings by Vincent van Gogh and Édouard Manet by the Pearlman Foundation, which is dividing its celebrated collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Modernist art among three museums.
In 1939, Kallir founded Galerie St. Etienne in New York, which became instrumental in establishing Austrian Expressionism in America, said Kallir’s granddaughter Jane Kallir. Jane Kallir took over the gallery with Kallir’s business partner, Hildegard Bachert, after Kallir’s death in 1978, and ran it for 40 years before launching the Kallir Research Institute.
Austrian Expressionists, including masters like Klimt and Schiele, “had no reputation outside of Austria then,” Jane Kallir told The Times, adding that Kallir built them up “by collaborating with museums and donating to museums.”
When Kallir died and Jane Kallir surveyed the work he left behind, she began thinking that if finances allowed, she’d like to one day complete her grandfather’s mission.
“Self Portrait With Brown Background” by Egon Schiele, 1912.
(Kallir Research Institute, New York)
In recent years, she happily realized she would be able to do just that. The question of where to donate the art came next, and Jane Kallir said there weren’t many places that came into play when she was looking for institutions with a long-standing commitment to Germanic modernism. For this reason, it soon became clear that LACMA was the answer, alongside the Getty Research Institute, which will also receive a selection of rare Viennese books, portfolios and prints that Kallir published.
A significant portion of the Kallir gift is composed of works on paper, which will be housed at LACMA’s Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies under the care of curator Timothy O. Benson. Benson is curating a show featuring 24 works from the gift, titled “Austrian Expressionism and Otto Kallir,” which will open Nov. 23 and run through May 31, 2026.
“German expressionism has always been something of an outlier in terms of American museum exhibition and collecting priorities,” Jane Kallir said. “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.”
Quite a bit of that scholarship has been done by Stephanie Barron, senior curator and head of modern art at LACMA, who has spent decades building her knowledge in the field by contributing to arts periodicals and books as well as staging exhibitions, including “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), among others.
Barron noted that L.A. has a long history of attracting accomplished Viennese emigres, including Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra, and that in the late 1930s and ’40s, a new wave of artists, actors, writers and thinkers who were fleeing the Nazis helped seed a thriving Austrian community in Southern California.
LACMA’s strength up until now, however, was German Expressionism, Barron said, adding that the museum’s collection 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,” said 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 will be crated and shipped in waves. The first group contains an exquisite 1897 Klimt portrait, titled “Woman With Fur Collar,” that Barron described as “small but mighty.”
Also of note: two Schiele landscapes that Jane Kallir called “blockbusters.”
“Sawmill” by Egon Schiele, 1913.
(Kallir Research Institute, New York)
“They are both seminal works from a key period in the artist’s life,” Jane Kallir said. “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 Kallir said.
Elevating and studying Schiele is something that occupied both Jane Kallir and her grandfather over the course of their professional careers, she said.
When Kallir fled the Nazis in 1938, immediately after the annexation of Austria, he had no problem taking Schiele paintings, watercolors and drawings out of Austria “because the Nazis considered Schiele degenerate,” Jane Kallir said. The artist also had no international value. This became a problem once Kallir got to New York because he couldn’t sell anything.
Kallir held Schiele’s first one-person show in 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 really amazing, Jane Kallir said, to compare that moment to Schiele’s reputation today. Fortunately for Angelenos, some of that work will soon be on view.
