AUSTRIAN RESTITUTION POLICY:
WHERE ARE WE, AND HOW DID WE GET HERE?
Jane Kallir, Co-Director, Galerie St. Etienne

As an American of Austrian Jewish descent, and an arts professional specializing in Austrian classical modernism, I have a very personal relationship to the topic at hand. In 1923, my grandfather, Otto Kallir, founded the original Neue Galerie in Vienna, which was the principal representative of such artists as Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka before World War II. He and my family fled Austria shortly after the 1938 Anschluss, and in 1939 they made their way to New York, where my grandfather established the Galerie St. Etienne. After the war, he renewed his professional ties to the Austrian art establishment, and used these connections to help refugee collectors recover works that had been left behind, looted or otherwise misappropriated. Among the people Kallir tried to help were Alma Mahler Werfel, the heirs of the composer Johann Strauss, and Leah Bondi.

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2015 Art Market Report
Where Are The Gatekeepers?

The Galerie St. Etienne’s 2015 State of the Market Report asks who, in today’s increasingly fragmented art world, decides what constitutes a great work of art. Curators? Critics? Collectors? The market?

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SPOTTING FORGERIES: POINTERS FROM SCHIELE EXPERT JANE KALLIR

Jane Kallir, Co-Director of the Galerie St. Etienne and author of the catalogue raisonné Egon Schiele: The Complete Works, recently spoke about forgeries at the American Society of Appraisers conference. Noting that the Internet and rising art values have produced a seeming increase in the number of fakes on the market, she said that the Galerie St. Etienne sees an average of one Schiele forgery a week, or about 50 a year.

Kallir identified three categories of forgery:

• Works by other artists to which a forged signature has been added. Stylistically, these pictures have little in common with the famous artist’s work.

• Copies of known, authentic works, sometimes with slight modifications. Usually these can be identified by comparison with a photograph of the original, but some copies are so close that photographs alone do not suffice.

• Wholly original images aping or pastiching the artist’s style. This type of forgery is the hardest to pull off successfully, because it requires a keen understanding of the artist’s style and methods, and an ability to emulate them.

Experts spend years studying “their” artist’s work in order to understand the nuances of technique, style and development that distinguish genuine works from fakes. The good news, Kallir concluded, is that most forgeries are actually very bad and easy to detect. The reason more fakes are coming to light today is that works are being more carefully scrutinized, and expertise has greatly improved. This is one of the positive results of art’s rising value.

(Images from top: Egon Schiele, 1918; an example of Schiele’s 1918 signature style.)

FIRST SCHIELE SOLD TO US MUSEUM

Egon Schiele’s Portrait of Paris von Gütersloh was the first painting by the artist to enter a United States museum collection. In 1954, Galerie St. Etienne sold the oil painting for $1,500 to a donor who gifted it to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

(Image: Egon Schiele, Portrait of the Painter Paris von Gütersloh, 1918, oil on canvas. The Minneapolis Institute of Arts; Gift of the P.D. McMillan Land Co., 1954.)

Egon Schiele’s A Tree in Late Autumn, today in the collection of the Leopold Museum in Vienna, was sold by Galerie St. Etienne for $125 in 1941. The collector paid over two years in $13 installments.

We are celebrating our 75th anniversary with masterworks by Schiele, Klimt and others. Alternate Histories on view through April 11.

(Image: Egon Schiele, A Tree in Late Autumn, 1911. Leopold Museum, Vienna.)

THE FACE THAT LAUNCHED A THOUSAND LAWSUITS

Wally Neuzil was Egon Schiele’s favorite model and true love until the time of his marriage, to another woman, in 1915. Now Wally is the subject of an exhibition at Vienna’s Leopold Museum. The star of the show is Portrait of Wally, a painting looted by the Nazis that was subject to prolonged litigation in the United States. In 2010, the Leopold Museum paid the original owner’s family $19 million to get the work back. The Wally case set precedents all over the world, prompting Austria to rewrite its restitution laws and unleashing a flood of similar lawsuits. But while the Leopold Museum is celebrating Wally as a person, the museum is making no mention of her portrait’s troubled past.

(Images: Portrait of Wally, 1912, Leopold Museum, Vienna; Holy Family (detail), 1913, private collection; Two Female Nudes (detail), 1912, private collection; Woman in Black Stockings (Wally Neuzil) (detail), 1913, private collection; Wally Neuzil, ca. 1912; Seated Woman in Black Dress (Wally Neuzil) (detail), 1912, private collection.)