Leon Abramowicz (1889-1978) - Ubekant

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

Early Life
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Abramowicz was born into a Jewish family in Czernowitz in Bukovina, Austria-Hungary (today 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 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 under Karl Raupp and Ludwig von Herterich. [1]

Career as an Artist
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After his service in World War I as a soldier in 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 settled in Vienna as a freelance painter and graphic artist. He soon achieved success and received commissions from the United States, especially 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.