Gustav Klimt’s portrait of Elisabeth Lederer. Her mother, Serena Lederer, was also painted by Klimt. So was her grandmother, Charlotte Pulitzer, a cousin of American newspaperman Joseph Pulitzer. Elisabeth married a Bachofen-Echt baron. When Hitler arrived her husband told her he was a Nazi, filed for divorce, and Aryanized her house and possessions, as the Lederer family was Jewish. Their little son died and she threw herself on the grave and had to be pulled away. Her mother fled to Budapest and died before the deportations began. Elisabeth went to a Nazi court to declare that Klimt was her father, making her half-Aryan, and not subject to deportation. She presented the court with a memoir of life with Klimt that is still the longest and most intimate account of anyone who knew Klimt. Elisabeth lived on in Nazi Vienna under the watch of an SS officer who was the brother of her Nazi ex-husband. He ordered her to stay home and stop visiting his little son, her nephew. She died in the winter of 1944 before the war ended, in circumstances so murky I suspect she took her own life. Her ex-husband took her house and paintings and jewelry. The Gestapo sent her mother’s Klimt Lederer collection to a castle that SS officers are believed to have torched. Her heirs recovered this portrait, which was going by the name of Portrait of Elisabeth Bachofen-Echt. It has since been renamed Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, and it was last seen hanging in the dining room of Leonard Lauder, the art collector, and brother of Ronald Lauder, whose Neue Galerie is the home of Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer, the Lady in Gold. #klimt #gustavklimt #elisabethbachofenecht #elisabethlederer #klimtswomen #neuegalerie #neuegalerienewyork #neuegalerieny #leonardlauder #leonardlaudercollection #arthistory #art #naziarttheft #nazilooting #vienna #vienna_austria #viennacity #belvedere #ladyingold #adeleblochbauer #portraitofadeleblochbauer (at Neue Galerie New York)
