The original Neue Galerie was established in Vienna by Otto Kallir (1894-1978) in 1923. “Newness” was a hallmark of the modernist art movements that flourished in German-speaking Europe during the first decades of the 20^th century. In 1909, Egon Schiele founded the Neukunstgruppe, a coalition of colleagues who exhibited together sporadically over the course of the next few years. Kallir opened the Neue Galerie with Schiele’s first major posthumous exhibition. Ronald Lauder honored this tradition of “newness” in 2001 by naming his New York Museum of Austrian and German Art the Neue Galerie.

Founded by Otto Kallir in Paris in 1939, the Galerie St. Etienne relocated to New York later that year, taking along the French name. (St. Etienne, St. Stephen in French, was a reference to Vienna’s landmark Stephansdom.) The gallery introduced the Austrian modernists—Richard Gerstl, Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Alfred Kubin and Egon Schiele—to the United States at a time when they were completely unknown here. In 1940, Kallir gave Anna Mary Robertson Moses, then an unknown farmwife from upstate New York, her first exhibition. “Grandma” Moses subsequently became the most famous and successful female artist of the postwar period, helping sustain the Galerie St. Etienne during its lean early years. Co-Director Hildegard Bachert (1921-2019) worked closely with Moses and saw to it that the gallery gave equal time to female artists such as Käthe Kollwitz and Paula Modersohn-Becker.

Otto Kallir (1894-1978) founded the original Neue Galerie in his native Vienna in 1923. As a Jew, he was forced to flee Austria after the Nazi Anschluss in 1938. He, his wife, and their two children ended up in New York, where he opened the Galerie St. Etienne on West 57^th Street in 1939. A lifelong admirer of Egon Schiele, Kallir had written the first catalogue raisonné of the artist’s paintings in 1930. He initially struggled to introduce Schiele and other Austrian modernists, such as Gustav Klimt, to American audiences, but by the 1960s he had achieved significant success through museum donations and collaborations. Kallir also represented the self-taught painter Anna Mary Robertson (“Grandma”) Moses, whose global acclaim sustained the gallery as it was still establishing itself. Kallir published a Moses catalogue raisonné in 1973, updated his Schiele raisonné in 1966 (oils) and 1970 (prints), and in 1974 published a documentation of the work of Richard Gerstl, whose estate he had rescued in 1931. After World War II, Kallir was one of the few people who endeavored to help persecuted collectors recover Nazi looted art. Though his efforts at the time were only partly successful, the resulting files helped Austria improve its restitution practices from 1998 onward.

A Jewish refugee from Mannheim, Germany, Hildegard Bachert (1921-2019) joined the staff of the Galerie St. Etienne in 1940 at the age of nineteen. She soon became Otto Kallir’s right hand, contributing significantly to all his exhibition and publication activities. Bachert was the gallery’s principal liaison with Anna Mary Robertson (“Grandma”) Moses, collaborating closely on her autobiography, My Life’s History, and a 1973 catalogue raisonné. Bachert was largely responsible for the prominence of female artists in the Galerie St. Etienne’s program. In 1958, she encouraged Kallir to mount Paula Modersohn-Becker’s first U.S. exhibition. Bachert was also a world-renowned expert on the art of Käthe Kollwitz. After Otto Kallir’s death in 1978, Bachert became co-director of the Galerie St. Etienne, together with Kallir’s granddaughter, Jane.

Jane Kallir (b. 1954), the granddaughter of Galerie St. Etienne founder Otto Kallir, joined the gallery staff in 1977. After Otto’s death in 1978, she and his longtime business partner, Hildegard Bachert, continued as co-directors. Jane Kallir expanded the gallery’s focus on scholarly publications and museum collaborations. To date, she has published more than 2O art books, on subjects ranging from Anna Mary Robertson (“Grandma”) Moses to the paintings of composer Arnold Schoenberg. In 1990, she issued the first catalogue raisonné of Egon Schiele’s work in all mediums (expanded edition, 1998; online edition, egonschieleonline.org, 2018). Kallir has curated or co-curated exhibitions for dozens of museums worldwide, including the Museo del Vittoriano in Rome; the Seoul Art Center in South Korea; the Setagaya Museum in Tokyo; the Belvedere, Leopold and Wien Museums in Vienna; and the National Gallery of Art and Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. In 1997, she gave her grandfather’s files on a stolen Schiele painting, Portrait of Wally, then on view at the Museum of Modern Art, to the New York Times. The resulting outcry prompted Austria to revise its restitution laws in 1998. Kallir has remained a staunch advocate of responsible provenance research, an integral component of the ongoing Schiele catalogue raisonné project.