by Tim Bonyhady
If Anne ever could relax, it was not in Vienna. “I never felt comfortable, let alone at home,” she observed in her memoir. Like most refugees who returned, she was suspicious of Austrians old enough to have been part of the Nazi regime. “I looked at people who passed me in the street and were of my own age group,” Anne wrote, “and wondered what they had been up to in 1938.” When we left for Prague after a stay of almost three weeks, she was happy to go. “Apart from Anni, there is nothing here,” she recorded. “I leave it as any other place.” Vienna for her was simply a city where she found it “easy to find my way and where I have a real friend.”
6
Dispersal
The Klimt revival was gaining momentum as we traveled. Prices for Klimt’s drawings, his most commonly available works, had risen from $120 in 1957 to $1,200 in 1964 to $4,000 in 1971. Although Anne, Bruce, and I arrived in England too late to see the Vienna Secession exhibition at the Royal Academy at the start of 1971 that identified Klimt as the “star” of the Secession, Anne heard about the excitement that this exhibition generated from Wilhelm Gallia’s youngest daughter, Friedl von Hoffmansthal, who was living in London. Anne also went to see the international auction house Christie’s, which advised that the portrait of Hermine should fetch between £10,000 (then, $24,200) and £12,000 (then $29,040), a small fortune.
The painting was with Christie’s just weeks after we returned. While we had one of the great experiences of our lives, Gretl feared something awful would happen to us all the time we were away. She worried as we flew to Frankfurt. She worried as we traveled around Europe for the next eight months. She worried as we flew back to Sydney in late August. The day we landed, she had a stroke and was hospitalized. As she remained there for weeks, and Kathe’s health also deteriorated sharply, Anne looked for ways to pay their medical expenses and fixed on the portrait, which she thought far too valuable to be in an apartment with no security. While Kathe owned the painting, she decided to auction it as the joint property of Gretl.
The portrait was part of a sale of impressionist and modern paintings that included a Picasso from his Blue Period, a Monet of the bridge at Argenteuil, portraits by Degas, Renoir, and Modigliani, and a landscape by Gauguin. These paintings all brought much more than the Klimt, which commentators recognized as “a fine example of his mature style” though “not one of his very greatest works.” Yet the Klimt was the work in the auction most discussed and reproduced because it had been identified as lost in the first complete catalog of Klimt’s paintings and because very few of his paintings reached the international art market. Christie’s estimate after seeing the actual painting was 15,000 to 20,000 guineas, much more than it had advised Anne when she was in England. The London dealers Harry and Wolfgang Fischer bought the portrait for 20,000 guineas, which was then $51,400, a world record for a Klimt.
Anne’s horror of almost everything from the Wohllebengasse first appears in a letter in 1948 in which she described the Hoffmann furniture as “all that stuff,” “gigantic things very hard to keep clean,” that were too big for the apartment in Sydney, making her feel as if she lived “in a furniture store or worse.” When she got the opportunity after marrying Eric, Anne sold one of the family’s sets of silver cutlery and replaced it with stainless steel because the silver was again “too much work to keep clean.” She also sold two of the Hoffmann armchairs and replaced them with much lighter new ones. Because the one surviving Hoffmann table from the salon was too high for these chairs, she got Bruce to cut down the table’s legs.
She duly wanted almost everything to go when Gretl had her stroke. Yet how to empty the apartment was far from simple when the furniture excited scant interest in Sydney despite its increasing international value. When a leading local auctioneer inspected the apartment, he advised Anne, “It will cost you a lot to get rid of all this.” She looked to Melbourne, where the National Gallery of Victoria was the only Australian museum with a significant European collection. When she approached the gallery early in 1972, she wrote: “My mother and aunt are giving up their flat in Sydney in which they have some furniture designed by Prof. Hoffmann of the Wiener Werkstätte, a lot of Viennese glass and silver, and a number of paintings. They want to sell the contents of their flat. I am wondering whether the gallery would be interested in inspecting and perhaps purchasing some of these objects.”
The gallery fixed on the Wiener Werkstätte collection. After three of its curators visited the apartment, the gallery immediately asked Anne to give it “priority of purchase” because the Hoffmann collection was of “great importance” and the gallery was “the best place in Australia for it.” But while Gretl was soon in a nursing home, the sale did not proceed because Kathe remained in the apartment and wanted her possessions around her. Meanwhile, Anne looked for other possible purchasers in Europe where she was surprised by the strength of the Hoffmann market and found the turn-of-the-century section of Vienna’s Museum of Applied Arts a revelation. A swatchbook containing examples of Wiener Werkstätte fabrics was, Anne observed, “exactly like” one acquired by Hermine and Moriz—the first time she saw that material in the apartment’s cupboards, which she otherwise had considered “useless,” was the stuff of a museum display.
The final years of Gretl and Kathe were all the more miserable because they continued to savage each other while needing each other desperately. In a letter to Kathe soon after she moved to the nursing home in Armidale, Gretl observed pointedly, “Nobody contradicts me or makes others believe that I am an idiot!” The pain that they inflicted by maintaining their girlhood practice of deriding each other was even clearer in another letter, in which Gretl promised to stop mocking how Kathe looked and spoke while instructing her, “You will never again be so cruel as to say you will send me to Callan Park,” a reference to Sydney’s mental asylum. Still, Kathe and she wrote to each other almost daily until Gretl died in 1975.
The responsibility of sorting everything overwhelmed and oppressed Anne when Kathe died in 1976. The first cupboard she opened in the flat was so full that as she pulled open its door, the contents spilled onto the floor, causing her to burst into tears. Many of the other cupboards were no different, as was the safe-deposit box in the city. She kept just a small number of objects particularly important to her, including the gold coins that Gretl had disguised as buttons when they fled Vienna. After almost forty years, Anne had no idea what exactly was inside these buttons and hence had no idea of their value. She implicitly recognized their symbolic significance by leaving them in their original stitching, and so they remained until I finally opened one while working on this book.
As Anne looked to test the market for the collection, she approached the Metropolitan Museum in New York, which suggested the flat contained “enough material for two museum installations” and was keen to secure one. But much as Kathe wanted to give the Klimt to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Anne wanted “to keep the collection together for the National Gallery of Victoria” so the Hoffmann material would remain in Australia, and she did not mind if she did not secure the best possible price for it. When Wolfgang Fischer of Fischer Fine Art offered £6,000 (or $10,620) just for the furniture in June, and the gallery offered £25,000 (then $30,500) for everything, including the furniture, carpets, silver, ceramics, glass, leatherwork, lace, and jewelry, she accepted.
She also offered to give the gallery the Andri portrait of Erni, Gretl, Kathe, and Lene because she did not want to live with the painting or sell it and thought it should always be with the rest of the collection. While the gallery’s curators of paintings refused the portrait, its head of decorative arts, Terry Lane, accepted it, making it the first painting to enter the gallery as a piece of decorative art. Because Lane took the portrait, Anne and he ensured the gallery would be able to break the mold of most museum displays of furniture, which typically are concerned only with materials, design, and workmanship, not who used these objects and how. The portrait allowed the gallery to put faces among th
e things and to bring the family and furniture together.
Lane was ecstatic after years of being on tenterhooks, uncertain when, if ever, Anne would make up her mind and what she would do. He knew the collection was the greatest acquisition he had made since becoming a curator—perhaps the greatest he would make. His understanding of both the global and local significance of the collection is clear from his acquisition’s proposal to the gallery’s council. He argued that the gallery needed to acquire the collection in its entirety because of its international importance as part of the “modern movement” and “as a memorial to the contribution of European migrants to the culture of this country.”
The remaining pictures from the flat in Cremorne were of no interest to anyone in Australia. If Anne wanted to sell these paintings, it had to be overseas, and, even then, the market for them was not strong. The obvious way to test this market was to auction the paintings in Vienna, but Anne feared that if they failed to reach their reserve, Austria’s new cultural protection authority would stop her from taking them out again. Nevertheless, there was competition for the pictures between Wolfgang Fischer and the Viennese opthalmologist Rudolf Leopold, who had amassed the finest private collection of the work of Egon Schiele, leading to Leopold being widely celebrated for his acumen as a collector and, in 2001, having the Austrian government and the National Bank of Austria combine to open a Leopold Museum in Vienna.
Anne was surprised by Leopold’s hospitality when she first called him in August 1975, having written to him from Australia after reading a review of his first book about Schiele. In four trips to Vienna, no one new had invited her. Leopold not only suggested she visit him immediately but also spent two hours showing her some of his pictures as well as expressing his interest in those in Sydney. Anne was so moved by this experience that she could think of little else the following day. “I cannot thank you enough for showing me your Schiele collection and so many other beautiful and interesting things,” she wrote to Leopold. “It all goes round and round my head,” she continued making plain her excitement and awe.
Anne was soon in turmoil as a result of the death of Gretl in Australia while she was in Europe. She also was desperate for company, which Leopold provided by inviting her again to his house and then taking her out for dinner. When she returned to Vienna after a week away, he called her at her hotel. The following night they went out again and, to her obvious delight, “talked very long about art.” Two days later, just before she returned to Australia, Leopold expressed particular interest in the Ribarz and Schindler in Cremorne, while denigrating the Viennese art dealers whom Anne had also been to see and emphasizing that everything he collected he kept.
Her return to Australia did nothing to reduce her turmoil because the death of Gretl was rapidly followed by that of Kathe, and then Bruce and I both moved to Canberra, leaving Anne in Armidale by herself. While she believed as a matter of principle that Bruce and I should leave home, in practice she was devastated by our departure. As she became desperate to create a new life for herself, she gave up her university lectureship in Armidale for a job as a schoolteacher in Sydney, where she had not lived for twenty years but still looked forward to finding much more company. She had just arrived in Sydney, late in 1976, when Leopold announced he was coming to Australia to see her pictures.
If only she had been able to read “The Chill of the Hunt,” an article about Leopold by the American writer Andrew Decker published in Art and Auction in 1990, which investigated some of Leopold’s art dealings from the 1960s and early 1970s. Decker began with Leopold’s acquisition of two Schieles from Eduard Wimmer-Wisgrill, a leading member of the Wiener Werkstätte. While Leopold bought these paintings on the basis that he would always keep them, he sold one almost immediately. Decker went on to discuss how Schiele’s sister Melanie Schuster, whom Leopold befriended when she was a vulnerable widow, sued him for fraud after Leopold “had her sign a sales contract, which she thought to be an inventory, at 1:30 a.m. when she was exhausted and just wanted him to leave her alone.” The result was a settlement in Schuster’s favor, although Leopold still got a great deal. It saw him return sixty-eight paintings and drawings and pay Schuster 710,000 schillings (then $30,800), while he kept fifty-one Schiele drawings and Schuster gave him three Schiele paintings.
An article by Judith Dobrzynski in the New York Times in 1997, which made looted Holocaust art an issue in the United States, would have disturbed Anne even more. It identified Leopold as someone engaged in “relentless pursuit of his quarry,” “who badgered and manipulated owners until they sold him their treasures, often at a very low price.” Its focus was two paintings on show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in Egon Schiele: The Leopold Collection, which Dobrzynski identified as stolen from their Jewish owners. Her most astonishing revelation involved a portrait by Schiele of his lover Wally Neuzil, which at the time of the Anschluss was part of the private collection of the Viennese art dealer Lea Bondi. Dobrzynski reported that when Leopold began amassing his collection in the 1950s, he had gone to see Bondi in London to ask her help in locating pictures by Schiele. When she in turn asked Leopold to help her recover the portrait of Wally, which the Österreichische Galerie had acquired illegitimately after the war, Leopold not only failed to do so but acquired the portrait for himself in exchange for pictures he owned.
Anne was oblivious to this record in 1976. For her, Leopold’s visit was a simple cause of delight, prompting her to invite him to stay, without considering how this would mean they could not negotiate at arm’s length over her paintings. But she also telephoned Wolfgang Fischer in London to suggest he make a firm offer for the pictures, since she wanted to have another bidder for them, just as she had for the Hoffmann collection. Four days later, Leopold rang twice more. In early December, he arrived. By Christmas, Anne and he were in court.
According to an affidavit sworn by Leopold, he arrived in Sydney having agreed with Anne that he would pay between 65,500 and 72,500 Swiss francs (then $26,475 and $29,300) for the paintings. The obvious basis on which the actual price would be determined was Leopold’s assessment of the pictures when he saw the originals in Sydney. If Leopold is to be believed, Anne and he settled on 67,750 Swiss francs (or $27,385) without his looking properly at the paintings, and it was only after they both signed an agreement for their sale that she allowed him “to look closely at them.” If Leopold entered into an agreement on this basis, it must have been because he knew he was getting the pictures so cheaply that it did not matter that he had not inspected them.
The agreement was drawn up by Leopold on December 5, handwritten in German, occupying barely more than half a page. It recorded that Anne was selling ten paintings—the Schindler, the Ribarz, two pictures by Moll, two landscapes by Stöhr, both harbor scenes by Kurzweil, the Andri landscape, and the Russian watercolor by Constantin Somoff, whom Leopold misidentified as “A. Canobz” after misreading Somoff’s Cyrillic signature, suggesting that he had no idea what he was acquiring. Leopold was to take these pictures with him to Vienna and, before the end of the month, pay Anne 67,750 Swiss francs. The document concluded: “Their agreement with everything above is attested by their signatures below.” After Leopold signed it, Anne followed suit.
Leopold’s affidavit suggests Anne was immediately unhappy with the contract, consistent with Bruce’s recollection that Leopold badgered Anne into signing it. Because she did not want to let Leopold take the paintings before she received the money, he agreed to let her keep the paintings until she was paid, but then he did not want to proceed on this basis because he did not trust her. Before long, he had found a lawyer and was threatening to institute proceedings to compel Anne to honor the agreement, only for Anne’s solicitor to dispute whether it was binding and suggest that Leopold’s lawyers consider Australia’s foreign exchange regulations, which prohibited dealings in foreign currencies such as Swiss francs without the permission of Australia’s Reserve Bank. When Leopold went to court, he did not win, as he
maintained in his biography. Instead, he settled, having agreed to pay 25 percent more for the paintings.
The most remarkable aspect of this episode involves a long-distance phone call made by Wolfgang Fischer in London in early December in the hope of persuading Anne to sell the pictures. As Leopold described it in his affidavit, he was alone in Anne’s Sydney apartment one evening when the phone rang and he chose to answer it. Leopold recorded: “I spoke to someone I realized was Fischer.” As Leopold clearly understood, Fischer wanted to buy the pictures. If Leopold believed that Anne and he had entered into a binding agreement, he could simply have told Fischer that he was too late. He did not. According to Leopold’s own affidavit, “I did not identify myself. I think he thought I was a member of the household. He gave me a message to pass on.… ‘Tell her she should send me a telegram, or better still ring in London and reverse the charges.’ ” The affidavit contains no apology for this piece of deception. Rather, it makes plain that, while Leopold had always known she was negotiating with other potential buyers, he saw this episode as occasion for interrogating Anne about Fischer. “I said ‘Do you have an agreement with him?’ This she denied. She said, ‘I had only a correspondence with him.’ She said she would not telephone him but would write to him and say she would not sell the paintings.”
Fischer’s version of this story was simpler. Leopold and he had competed “for a collection owned by an Austrian woman who had fled to Australia. One day, I called Australia to ask if my offer was acceptable. I thought I got her son, who said his mother was not available.” Fischer did not think further about what had happened until much later when he encountered Leopold, who asked him, “Didn’t you ring up the lady?” When Fischer said yes, but that he had spoken only with her son, Leopold responded, “You’re wrong. It was me you spoke to.” Leopold told this story out of intense competitiveness. He wanted one of his prime rivals to know how he had been outwitted, little realizing that Fischer would get his own back by telling Judith Dobrzynski, who published his account in the New York Times as a prime example of how Leopold would go to almost any lengths to enhance his collection.
