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 (now Chernivtsi, Ukraine). His father worked as a butcher. His brother was Serge Abranovic (stage name; died 1942 in Warsaw), who was celebrated as the “Caruso of the 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 his service 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] Subsequently he established himself as a freelance painter and graphic artist in Vienna. He was soon successful and received commissions from the USA, especially for portraits. This enabled him to rent a studio on Vienna’s Prinz-Eugen-Strasse and to buy for himself and his wife Maria, née Prenosyl (* 1907), an apartment at Schottenbastei 16 in the city center of Vienna.

Confiscations and internments from the Nazi era
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After Austria’s Anschluss to Nazi Germany in March 1938, Abramowicz and his wife were persecuted under the anti-Jewish laws in Nazi Austria. Abramowicz fled to France on May 24, 1938; his wife followed him in January 1939. [3] Their apartment along with its furnishings was confiscated in 1938. The inventory of the apartment and the studio, including the entire artistic output since 1918, an estimated 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 paintings by modern painters, and several projection and photographic cameras, was confiscated and forcibly sold. [4] [5] Their whereabouts are unknown. [3]

After escaping, 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. With the approval of the Grenoble Prefecture, however, they received a refugee apartment as victims of the Nazis. [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 underground with the help of a Jewish refugee committee until the country’s liberation. [2]

Photos are part of the condition description.