Galerie St. Etienne

Galerie St. Etienne is a New York art gallery specializing in Austrian and German Expressionism, established in Vienna in 1939 by Otto Kallir (originally Otto Nirenstein). In 1923, Kallir founded the Neue Galerie in Vienna. Forced to leave Austria after the 1938 Nazi invasion, Kallir established his gallery in Paris as the Galerie St. Etienne, named after the Neue Galerie's location near Vienna's Cathedral of St. Stephen. In 1939, Kallir and his family left France for the United States, moving the Galerie St. Etienne to New York City. The gallery still exists, run by Otto Kallir's granddaughter Jane at 24 West 57th Street. Vienna After antisemitism at Vienna’s Technische Hochschule forced Kallir to abandon his dream of becoming an aeronautical engineer, he decided instead to pursue a longstanding interest in art. In 1919, he established a publishing concern, the Verlag Neur Graphik, on the premises of the Galerie Würthle, a leading art gallery in Vienna. In 1923, Kallir opened his own gallery, the Neue Galerie, for which the New York museum of Austrian and German art and design was later named. The Vienna gallery opened with the first major posthumous exhibition of Egon Schiele's work, and continued to represent artists such as Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele, Richard Gerstl and Alfred Kubin. In addition to the work of Austrian artists, Kallir brought international figures like Vincent van Gogh, Paul Signac, Auguste Renoir and Paul Cézanne to the gallery. Kallir also published limited edition prints by artists like Max Beckmann, Johannes Itten, Oskar Kokoschka and Alfred Kubin, and most notably a portfolio of Egon Schiele's etchings and lithographs, Das Graphische Werk von Egon Schiele, continuing to utilize the publishing skills he developed early in his career. The Anschluss and its aftermath After the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938, Kallir faced persecution not only for being Jewish, but for supporting the Schuschnigg government. He sold the Neue Galerie to his secretary, Vita Kūnstler, who preserved the gallery as best she could and voluntarily returned it to Kallir after World War II. Because work by the modern artists the gallery represented was not subject to Austria's export laws and was in most cases, considered by the Nazis to be "degenerate", Kallir was able to bring a significant portion of the gallery's inventory with him into exile.