... Open Art Data ...: Portraits of Murder and Plunder

Amalie Zuckerkandl was at the height of her beauty when Gustav Klimt begin this (unfinished) portrait of her in 1917-8. A member of the Viennese Zuckerkandl family, Amalie was murdered in the Holocaust along with her daughter Nora Stiansy because they were Jewish, and her portrait was stolen by Nazis.

Serena (Szeréna) Lederer was the model for this beautiful portrait by Gustav Klimt. Her family, which was Jewish, was plundered by the Nazis. Serena Lederer died in 1943 as a refugee from Nazism.

This magnificent portrait by Klimt depicts the Jewish Austrian intellectual and feminist Adele Bloch-Bauer. Commissioned by her husband, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, a Jewish banker and sugar producer, the painting was looted by the Nazis in 1941, along with numerous other artworks.

Irène Cahen d'Anvers was eight years old when her father, the French Jewish banker Louis Cahen d'Anvers, commissioned this lovely portrait from Pierre-Auguste Renoir in 1880. During World War II, the Nazis stole the portrait and murdered Irène's daughter, Béatrice, her ex-son-in-law and their two children because of their Jewish ancestry.

The painter Eduard Einschlag was murdered in the Treblinka concentration camp in 1942, and his estate was confiscated. He painted this self portrait in 1930.

Renoir painted this portrait of the Austrian actress Tilla Durieux (Ottilie Godeffroy, 1880–1971) in 1914 when she was married to the art dealer Paul Cassirer. After Cassirer's suicide she married Ludwig Katzenellenbogen who was deported and murdered in the Nazi Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1944 because Jewish.

Selfportrait by the German Jewish painter Ernst Oppler, showing himself as an art collector. Ernest Oppler died in 1929, thus escaping the Holocaust, but many members if his family were plundered and persecuted by the Nazis; his brother, the doctor Berthold Oppler, committed suicide in detention on 6 January 1943 to avoid imminent deportation to a Nazi death camp.

The German Jewish painter Charlotte Salomon looks warily at the viewer in this self-portrait from 1940; her family fled Germany for France after Kristallnacht but, five months pregnant, she was captured and murdered in Auschwitz in 1943.

This brooding self-portrait was painted by the German Jewish artist Felix Nussbaum who died in Auschwitz in 1944.

Getrud Loew was the daughter of Gustav Klimt's doctor, Anton Loew. She was 19 years old when this portait was painted (see full length here). She managed to escape Nazi Vienna in 1939, under her widowed name Gertha Felsöványi.

"Pieces with titles that referenced their Jewish origins, were completely changed. For example, The Portrait of Margaret Stonborough Wittgenstein (a Jew) became Damenbildnis in Weiss (Portrait of a lady in white)." - (Morowitz, Laura. “‘Heil the Hero Klimt!’: Nazi Aesthetics in Vienna and the 1943 Gustav Klimt Retrospective.” Oxford University Press 39, no. 1 (2016): 122-23. cited by Gabrielle Knight in Honors Thesis)

Little is known about Walburga "Wally" Neuzil, the blue-eyed model painted by Egon Schiele in 1912. The portrait was stolen by a Nazi art dealer from the collection of Jewish collector Lea Bondi Jaray when her gallery was Aryanized by Nazis in 1939 and she was forced to flee Vienna as a Jew.

For more reading, see:

Un tableau de Klimt volé par les nazis n'a jamais été restitué à son propriétaire

‘Heil the Hero Klimt!’: Nazi Aesthetics in Vienna and the 1943 Gustav Klimt Retrospective

Leipzig gibt jüdischer Familie ein Stück Geschichte zurück

A Blood-Stained Renoir on Exhibit in Paris

Leipzig Mayor Hand Delivers Nazi-era Art to Painter's Heirs

Case Review: Cassirer v. Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection Foundation

Holocaust Victim Assets Litigation Case No. CV96-4849

Ein Haus wie ein Museum

Die Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz gibt Kunstwerke aus der Sammlung des von den Nationalsozialisten verfolgten und ermordeten Max Silberberg zurück.

Münchner Kunstfund Bewusst verschleiert

A Tale of Two Portraits, by Rudolf Beran