Overview
Jane Kallir (born July 30, 1954) is an American art dealer, curator and author. She is co-director of the Galerie St. Etienne in New York, which specializes in Austrian and German Expressionism as well as self-taught and “outsider” art. In 2020, the gallery ceased commercial operations and became an art advisory. Its archives and library were transferred to the Kallir Research Institute, a foundation established in 2017. Kallir serves as President of the KRI. She has curated exhibitions for many American and international museums and is the author of the catalogue raisonné of Egon Schiele’s work in all mediums.
Life and career
Kallir was born in New York City and graduated from Brown University in 1976, with a BA in art and art history. In 1977, she began working for her grandfather, Otto Kallir, who founded the Galerie St. Etienne in 1939 in New York.
She became the gallery’s co-director, with Hildegard Bachert (d. 2019), in 1979. In 1985, Kallir married Gary Cosimini, whom she had met in college. The couple divorced in 1996 and remarried in 2008.
Under Kallir’s direction in 1980, the Galerie St. Etienne initiated a regular program of museum-scale loan exhibitions, a practice not then common among commercial galleries.
These shows were routinely accompanied by book-length catalogues, published by trade publishers. Lenders included the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Phillips Collection, the Kunsthalle Bremen, the Lenbachhaus in Munich, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Wien Museum and the Belvedere in Vienna, plus many private collectors.
From Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).