Klimt art and more on the way to L.A.

LACMA is being gifted more than 100 works of Austrian Expressionism.

- BY JESSICA GELT

Photographs from Kallir Research Institute EGON SCHIELE'S "Self-Portrait With Brown Background," 1912, a gift from the Kallir family.

More than 100 works of Austrian Expressionism worth “well over” $60 million are being gifted to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art by the family of Otto Kallir, a renowned 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 from Alfred Kubin, Oskar Kokoschka and Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, as well as German artists Lovis Corinth and Kathe Kollwitz. The news comes two months after LACMA was gifted its first paintings by Vincent van Gogh and Edouard Manet by the Pearlman Foundation, which is dividing its celebrated collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Modernist art among three museums.

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

Austrian Expressionists, including masters like Klimt and Schiele, “had no reputation outside of Austria then,” Jane Kallir told The Times, adding that Kallir built them up “by collaborating with museums and donating to museums.”

When Kallir died and Jane Kallir surveyed the work he left behind, she began thinking that if finances allowed, she'd like to one day complete her grandfather’s mission.