Leon Abramowicz (1889-1978) - Landschaft

The painting was acquired from a private collection in Salzburg, Austria.

Leon Abramowicz (March 18, 1889 – February 15, 1978) was a Jewish Austrian painter who emigrated from National Socialist Austria.

Early life
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Abramowicz was born into a Jewish family in Czernowitz in Bukovina, Austria-Hungary (today Cernivtsi, Ukraine). His father worked as a butcher. His brother was Serge Abranovic (artist name; died 1942 in Warsaw), who was celebrated as the “Caruso of Operetta.” Abramowicz studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and from 1912 to 1914 at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Munich with Karl Raupp and Ludwig von Herterich. [1]

Career as an artist
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After serving in the First World War as a soldier of the Austrian Army, Abramowicz lived in Switzerland and France and from the 1920s in Vienna, where he worked as a freelance painter. From 1933 to 1935 he studied at the Vienna Academy with Karl Sterrer. [2] He subsequently settled in Vienna as a freelance painter and graphic artist. He soon achieved success and received commissions from the United States, particularly for portraits. This enabled him to rent a studio on Vienna’s Prinz-Eugen-Strasse and to buy an apartment for himself and his wife Maria, born Prenosyl (*1907), at Schottenbastei 16 in central Vienna.

Confiscations and internments from the Nazi era
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After the Anschluss of Austria to National Socialist Germany in March 1938, Abramowicz and his wife were persecuted under the anti-Jewish laws in National Socialist Austria. Abramowicz fled to France on May 24, 1938, followed by his wife in January 1939. [3] Their apartment and its contents were confiscated in 1938. The inventory of the apartment and the studio, including all artistic work since 1918, estimated at about 600 oil paintings and 7,000 works on paper, copies after old masters, splendid original costumes that Abramowicz had used for his works, a small collection of works by modern painters, as well as several motion picture projectors and cameras, was seized and auctioned under duress. [4] [5] Their whereabouts are unknown. [3]

After fleeing, the couple initially went to Nice. Abramowicz befriended the painter Pierre Bonnard, who strongly influenced him artistically. In 1940 Abramowicz and his wife were separated and placed in internment camps. However, with the approval of the Grenoble Prefecture, they were granted a refugee apartment as Nazi victims. [2] In July 1943 the wife was captured by the Nazis and deported to the Gurs concentration camp. Abramowicz was arrested in August 1943 during a raid and taken to a camp in Toulouse. He and his wife managed to escape, and they lived in hiding with the help of a Jewish refugee committee until the country’s liberation. [2]

Photos are part of the condition description.