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<\/p>\nIn November last year, Sotheby\u2019s New York auctioned works from the collection of Leonard Lauder, the late Jewish cosmetics scion. The highlight of the collection was Lot\u00a08: Gustav Klimt\u2019s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, which changed hands at US$236.4 million, including premiums, making it the most valuable Klimt to appear on the market to date.<\/p>\n
Some years earlier, Lauder\u2019s younger brother, Ronald, was instrumental in acquiring Klimt\u2019s iconic Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, otherwise known as Woman in Gold, for US$135 million. At the time of him purchasing the picture for his New York-based Neue Galerie in 2006, it was the most valuable painting to have changed hands in history.<\/p>\n
This is the story not of those pictures but of another wildly valuable Klimt portrait, which was offered as a gift to an Australian art gallery, and rejected.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
When war loomed in Europe in the late 1930s, the children of wealthy Viennese industrialists Moriz and Hermine Gallia were seeking refuge from Nazi invasion. Despite having converted to Catholicism, their Jewish lineage haunted their paperwork and the family were aware they needed to flee.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
As significant patrons of the arts in Austria during the early 20th century, Moriz and Hermine had amassed an enormous collection of work by Josef Hoffmann, Gustav Klimt, Carl Moll and Ferdinand Andri. Their three children meticulously packed their late parents\u2019 priceless furniture, paintings, silverware and objets d\u2019art ready for transportation to Sydney, Australia.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s thought the gallery rejected the painting because it believed that a\u00a0portrait of a foreign Jewish woman would be of little interest to the Australian public.<\/p>\n
At the time, Austria was annexed to Germany and their parents\u2019 possessions were not viewed as culturally valuable. The work was seen as \u201cnew\u201d and therefore of little historic value. Mercifully, the siblings were allowed to take their inherited collection out of Europe.<\/p>\n
Upon arrival, two of the siblings, Kathe and Gretl, settled with Gretl\u2019s daughter, Annelore, in a modest flat in Cremorne on Sydney\u2019s lower north shore. This flat was to house one of the most complete collections of secessionist decorative arts and artwork the world had ever seen.<\/p>\n
Come the 1960s, Kathe and Gretl were aware their small flat housed pieces of cultural importance. The stand-out work was Klimt\u2019s Portrait of Hermine Gallia. Commissioned by their father, Moriz, this large painting of their mother was finished in 1904, at the very beginning of what has been dubbed Klimt\u2019s golden era. The three-quarter-length painting depicts Hermine standing in an elaborate, flowing white gown, her hands clasped in front of her. It appears as though she is floating over a geometric rug, a recurring characteristic of Klimt\u2019s work.<\/p>\n
Thirty years after arriving in Australia, Kathe Gallia approached the Art Gallery of New South Wales and offered the portrait of Hermine as a gift. This attempted donation was, to the family\u2019s amazement, declined by the gallery, under the directorship of Hal Missingham.<\/p>\n
The episode is recounted in Good Living Street, written by Kathe\u2019s great nephew, Tim Bonyhady, an art historian and director of the Australian Centre for Environmental Law at the Australian National University. He notes his Great Aunt Kathe felt she held a\u00a0serious debt to Australia, and her newfound community, for taking in the family as refugees, and this was one reason for offering the picture to the state\u2019s gallery.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s thought the gallery rejected the painting because it believed that a\u00a0portrait of a foreign Jewish woman would be of little interest to the Australian public. The astonishing rejection undoubtedly reinstated to Kathe and Gretl Gallia that, despite having survived the Holocaust, having buried their background and assimilated into Sydney life, they were still seen as second-class citizens.
At the time, the gallery director had a very limited capacity to make his own acquisitions. He had won the right to make limited contemporary purchases, although these were subject to the veto of the institution\u2019s trustees.<\/p>\n
In the case of the Klimt portrait, it would have been the trustees who rejected the work. Missingham, however, would have been responsible for telling the sisters that the portrait of their mother was not wanted.<\/p>\n
Writing in his memoir, published in 1973 and titled They Kill You in the End, Missingham said: \u201cEarly trustees were inordinately partisan about what they considered to be true art as opposed to all the horrible modern rubbish infiltrating the pure art of Australia. There was also a tremendously strong anti-Jewish feeling, so that not only were paintings by Jewish artists disregarded, but gifts or loans offered by Jews were smartly declined.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
At the time of the attempted donation, it should be noted that Klimt was not nearly as renowned as he is today, although any serious curator could recognise a secessionist renaissance in the air. It was a mere decade later, in 1973, that the Whitlam government acquired Jackson Pollock\u2019s Blue Poles for the National Gallery in Canberra, at the controversial price of $1.3 million, a painting estimated to be worth $500 million today. The Pollock is now considered one of Australia\u2019s most praised and respected art acquisitions, not to mention the most valuable work in any Australian public institution.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
In many respects, Gretl, Kathe and Annelore had the last laugh. By 1971, the secessionist movement was picking up speed once again. London\u2019s Royal Academy held the exhibition\u00a0 Vienna Secession, which put Klimt, Hoffmann and their contemporaries back on the map.<\/p>\n
With the sisters\u2019 health deteriorating and no security in their flat, Annelore sent Portrait of Hermine Gallia to Christie\u2019s in London, where it sold for 20,000 guineas in November of the same year. In today\u2019s currency, this amount equates to more than $500,000, and when it hammered down it was a world record price for a work by Klimt.<\/p>\n
In 1976, Portrait of Hermine Gallia was bought for the permanent collection of the National Gallery in London. It is the only Klimt painting held in a public collection in Britain. The gallery describes it as \u201ca fine example of the portraits of society women he painted in the early years of the twentieth century\u201d. For further context, they add: \u201cHermine Gallia and her husband were also important patrons of the avant garde.\u201d<\/p>\n
What happened to the balance of the sisters\u2019 estate? The bulk of what remained of Moriz and Hermine\u2019s collection was purchased by the National Gallery of Victoria in the later part of the 1970s.<\/p>\n
The then curator at the gallery, Terence Lane, advocated to acquire everything that remained and understood the importance of the Gallia collection. To date, it is considered one of if not the most complete collection of secessionist interiors and design in the world.<\/p>\n
What is now known as the \u201cGallia Suite\u201d remains on permanent display in the NGV and attracts visitors worldwide.<\/p>\n
Ironically, when the Gallia Suite was first unveiled at the NGV, curators had to request for the Portrait of Hermine Gallia to be given on loan from London\u2019s National Gallery. The picture should have been an interstate courier away.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on
\n March 11, 2026 as “The Klimt Australia rejected”.<\/p>\n
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