Portrait of Amalie Zuckerkandl (1914 CE)

An unfinished square of canvas in Vienna’s Upper Belvedere still holds a face Klimt finished and a life history he could not have imagined. The portrait of Amalie Zuckerkandl is one of his last works, left incomplete when he died in 1918, and it later became entangled with war, flight, forced sale, and a restitution case Austria ultimately refused.

Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Amalie Zuckerkandl is not the gilded Vienna of The Kiss. It is a nearly square oil painting, 128 × 128 cm (50.4 × 50.4 in), in which only the sitter’s head, throat, and bare shoulders are brought to a high finish. The rest of the picture is a pale field of underdrawing and thin color: a dress suggested rather than clothed, a green-turquoise ground with faint floral marks, the lower left beginning to take on folds of fabric. Amalie looks out with dark, upswept hair, a black choker, and a white lace ruff tied at the throat. The gaze is calm and slightly distant. Because Klimt died before he could complete the costume and background, the painting has become both a portrait and a demonstration of how he worked in his final years—face first, ornament last. 

Commissioned in Peace, Interrupted by War

The portrait was commissioned around 1913 or 1914 by Otto Zuckerkandl, a leading Viennese urologist and surgeon, as a likeness of his wife. Amalie Schlesinger had been born in Vienna on 1 August 1869, daughter of the playwright and journalist Sigmund Schlesinger. On 7 July 1895 she married Otto, converting to Judaism beforehand and taking the name Miriam. The couple belonged to the city’s assimilated Jewish elite. Otto’s brother Emil was the famous anatomist; Emil’s wife, Berta Zuckerkandl, ran a salon that gathered writers, doctors, and Secession artists, and she was a long-standing supporter of Klimt. That network almost certainly brought the commission into being.

When the First World War broke out, Otto went to serve as a doctor in Lviv (then Lemberg), and Amalie worked there as a nurse. Klimt set the canvas aside. After the family returned to Vienna he took the portrait up again, making further pencil studies and receiving an interim payment of 4,000 crowns from Otto in 1917. In early 1918 Klimt suffered a stroke, developed pneumonia, and died on 6 February. The painting was still on the easel. The marriage itself did not survive the war’s aftermath; Otto and Amalie divorced in 1919, and he died in 1921.

Amalie’s later life darkened in ways the unfinished picture now seems to anticipate. After the divorce she lived more modestly, at times with a right of residence connected to the family’s Sanatorium Purkersdorf. In the late 1920s, short of money, she sold the portrait to Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, the sugar industrialist and widower of Adele Bloch-Bauer, whose golden Klimt portrait is the most famous of all Viennese society likenesses. The canvas hung in Bloch-Bauer’s bedroom and was exhibited in 1928 as his property. After the Anschluss in 1938 he fled. The painting returned, by a route that is still disputed, to Amalie’s family. In November 1941 the seventy-two-year-old Amalie and her daughter Eleonore were forced into a collective apartment in Vienna. On 9 April 1942 they were deported to Izbica and murdered, most likely at the Bełżec extermination camp. Eleonore’s husband and son were also killed. Amalie’s son Viktor, a musicologist, had escaped to the United States in 1938; her daughter Hermine survived in hiding in Bavaria with her husband, the painter Wilhelm Müller-Hofmann.

The Collar, the Nurse, and a Sentence That Cost the Heirs

Several details around the picture have the quality of stories people retell because they will not sit still. One is visual. Commentators have long noticed that the black band and white ruff at Amalie’s throat—so carefully painted against her pale skin—can look, in the emptied composition, like a noose that might yet be drawn tight. The observation is interpretive rather than documentary, but it has shaped how the work is read next to Klimt’s earlier jewelled women. Another concerns the sittings themselves. Klimt almost certainly completed the face and shoulders in the pre-war sessions. The war years in Lviv explain the long pause. When he returned to the canvas he added little oil; the dress and shawl remain readable mainly from the pencil drawing still visible on the ground. 

A Portrait of an Ending

Within Klimt’s career the Zuckerkandl portrait stands at the far edge of his work as “painter of women.” The so-called Golden Phase, with its Byzantine mosaics of gold leaf, had closed around 1909. The late portraits are more painterly, more open in color, sometimes compared with Fauvism in their loosened ground. Here that late manner is visible in raw form. The finished flesh is still Klimt’s—cool light on the face, the contrast of dark hair and the eccentric collar—but the body has not yet been wrapped in the patterned textiles that made his society portraits objects of luxury. The square format, unusual in its exact equality of height and width, isolates the figure like an icon that never received its frame of ornament.

Culturally the picture belongs to two Viennas at once. It was commissioned inside the world of the Ringstrasse bourgeoisie, of medical professors, Secession exhibitions, and Jewish conversion and assimilation. It was left unfinished as that world collapsed. Later writers have set it directly against Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I of 1907. Adele sits in gold, diamonds, and triumph; Amalie sits in an emptied field. Both women look past the viewer, but the historical interval between them contains the war, the end of Habsburg Austria, and, for Amalie, the racial laws that would treat her conversion and marriage as enough to mark her for death. The canvas therefore functions as a secular relic—an interrupted society portrait that now also commemorates a murdered sitter. 

Canvas, Measure, and the Order of Work

The painting is oil on canvas, 128 centimeters high by 128 centimeters wide, or 50.4 by 50.4 inches. It is unlabelled and unvarnished in the sense that large areas never received a final paint layer. Preparatory drawings survive; one important seated study with interlocked hands, dated around 1913–14, is in the Albertina. Early sheets show a standing pose before Klimt settled on the seated, slightly turned figure of the oil painting. 

From the Doctor’s House to a Palace Museum

Otto Zuckerkandl was the first owner as commissioner. After the 1919 divorce the portrait passed to Amalie. In the late 1920s she sold it to Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer; it is listed in a 1932 inventory of the Bloch-Bauer palace on Elisabethstrasse, in the bedroom, with a handwritten note “Zuckerkandl.” It appeared in Paris in 1937 in an exhibition of Austrian art. After March 1938, when Bloch-Bauer fled, the work left his collection. Whether he returned it as a gift to Amalie or her daughter, or whether it was extracted in the liquidation of his property by the lawyer Erich Führer, has never been settled with documents firm enough for Austrian restitution law. What is documented is that by 1942 the family sold it, far below value, to Vita Künstler, then associated with the Neue Galerie after Otto Kallir’s emigration. Her husband bought it from her; it hung first in his office at Berglandverlag on Schwarzenbergplatz and later in their home.

Künstler bequeathed the painting to the Österreichische Galerie in the Belvedere and advanced the gift in 1988; she died in 2001. When heirs of Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer—most prominently Maria Altmann—won the return of five other Klimts in 2006, including both Adele portraits, the same arbitration process excepted Amalie Zuckerkandl. The panel found that the conditions of the 1998 restitution law were not met: ownership between 1938 and 1942 was too uncertain, and coercion in the transfer from Bloch-Bauer could not be proved to the standard required. The Austrian Supreme Court confirmed the museum’s title in 2008. The portrait remains in the Upper Belvedere, sometimes described in the press as the portrait of a murdered woman that Austria kept. 

That is where the story rests: a canvas begun for a doctor’s wife in late imperial Vienna, stopped by a world war and an artist’s death, sold in poverty, moved under Nazism, given to the state, and left on public view as both a lesson in Klimt’s late technique and a reminder of how incomplete a life, and a painting, can end.