LACMA is acquiring the first Klimt and Schiele paintings as part of a major gift

More than 100 Austrian Expressionist works of art were gifted to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art by the family of Otto Kahler, the famous 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 by Alfred Kubin, Oskar Kokoschka and Marie-Louise von Motyszky, as well as German artists Lovis Corinth and Kathe Kollwitz. The news comes two months after the Los Angeles County Museum of Art acquired its first paintings of Vincent van Gogh and Edouard Manet by the Perelman Foundation, which is dividing its famed collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Modernist art among three museums.

In 1939, Callier founded the Galerie Saint-Etienne in New York, which became instrumental in establishing Austrian Expressionism in America, said Callier’s granddaughter, Jeanne Callier. Jane took over the gallery with Kahler’s business partner, Hildegard Bachert, after Kahler’s death in 1978, and ran it for 40 years before launching the Kahler Research Institute.

The Austrian Expressionists, including masters like Klimt and Schiele, “did not have a reputation outside of Austria at that time,” Jane told The Times, adding that Kahler built them up “by collaborating with museums and donating to museums.”

When Caller died and Jane surveyed the work he left behind, she began to think that, finances permitting, she would like to complete her grandfather’s mission one day.

In recent years, she happily realized that she would be able to do just that. Next came the question of where to donate art, and Jane 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 quickly became clear that LACMA was the answer, along with the Getty Research Institute, which would also acquire a selection of Viennese books, portfolios and rare publications published by Caller.

A large portion of Kaler’s gift consists of works on paper, which will be housed at LACMA’s Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressive Studies under the care of curator Timothy O. Benson. Benson is curating a show of 24 works from the gift titled “Austrian Expressionism and Otto Kahler,” which will open on November 23 and run through May 31, 2026.

“German Expressionism has always been an outsider in terms of American museum display and collecting priorities,” Jane said. “And frankly, when I think about it, there is no institution in the United States that equals LACMA in terms of the pioneering scholarship it provides in this field.”

A good portion of this scholarship has been provided by Stephanie Baron, Senior Curator and Head of the Department of Modern Art at LACMA, who has spent decades building her knowledge in the field by contributing to art periodicals and books as well as curating exhibitions, including “German Expressionist Sculpture” (1982), “Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany” (1991), “Exiles + Emigrants: “The journey.” Hitler’s European Artists” (1997) and “New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic, 1919-1933” (2015), among others.

Baron noted that Los Angeles had a long history of attracting prominent Viennese immigrants, including Rudolf Schindler and Richard Neutra, and that in the late 1930s and 1940s, a new wave of artists, actors, writers and intellectuals fleeing the Nazis helped seed a thriving Austrian community in Southern California.

LACMA’s strength so far has been German Expressionism, Baron said, adding that the museum’s collection of Austrian Expressionism has been weak.

“It was a loophole, and I never thought we would have prayers to fix it,” Barron said. “So just being able to have Klimt and Schiele paintings for the collection, to enhance our Expressionist holdings, is something that has been a long-term dream of mine. And I’m very grateful for that.”

The work will be boxed and shipped in waves. The first group contains a magnificent 1897 portrait by Klimt, entitled “Woman with a Fur Collar,” which Baron described as “small but powerful.”

Also of note are two landscapes that Jane called “hipster.”

“They are both seminal works from a key period in the artist’s life,” Jane said. “They are large and magnificent. The paintings will be supplemented by at least nine or 10 works on paper. Schiele is an artist also known for his watercolors and drawings.”

“In one fell swoop, Los Angeles becomes a center for Schiele studies,” Jane said.
Raising and studying his schiehl is something that has occupied both Jane and her grandfather throughout their careers, Jane said.

When Kahler fled the Nazis in 1938, right after the annexation of Austria, he had no problem taking Schiele’s paintings, watercolors and drawings from Austria “because the Nazis considered Schiele degenerate,” Jane said. The artist also had no international value. This became a problem once Kaler arrived in New York because he was unable to sell anything.

Caller held Shelley’s first solo show in the United States in 1941. “The drawings were $20 each. The watercolors were $60 each. He didn’t sell a single painting. He sold one painting—a very small painting—for $250, and the man who bought it paid the $250 in monthly installments of $13 over two years.”

Jane said it was truly amazing to compare that moment to Shelley’s reputation today. Fortunately for Angelenos, some of these businesses will be appearing soon.