A portrait Gustav Klimt failed to complete before his death has left a trail across the art world, but how many know the story of the woman portrayed? Her secrets have long lain buried in the archives of the Vienna Jewish community, where the painting’s wanderings reveal her family history

Somewhere in the Belvedere Palace Museum, in Vienna’s Third Quarter, hangs an unfinished, unsigned portrait of Amalie Zuckerkandl. Gustav Klimt was commissioned to paint Amalie in 1914; his work was interrupted when the Zuckerkandls left Vienna for war work at the hospital in Lviv. Klimt resumed work after their return but suffered a fatal stroke on February 6, 1918. Like another of Klimt’s famous portraits, this one became the focus of a legal battle regarding Holocaust victims’ property. Correspondence filed in the Viennese section of the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People reveals much about Frau Zuckerkandl’s life and personality.

 

The Doctor and His Ex

Amalie Schlesinger was born in Vienna in 1869 and married Prof. Otto Zuckerkandl when she was twenty-six. A world-famous urologist and nephrologist, Otto headed the Vienna Jewish community’s Baron Rothschild Hospital from 1902 until his death in 1921. Otto and Amalie’s marriage certificate, filed in the Viennese Jewish community archive, shows that she converted to Judaism prior to the wedding and adopted the name Miriam. Although Schlesinger is a classic Jewish German name, and Amalie’s father was indeed Jewish, her mother was not. Her semi-Jewish status, at least from an Austrian legal viewpoint, explains her tragic end. 

The Zuckerkandls had three children; Victor, Eleanora, and Hermina. In 1930, Victor was a journalist and music critic in Berlin, Eleanore (or Nora, as they called her) was married to a bank clerk named Stiasny, and Hermina was the wife of Wilhelm Müller-Hofmann, a painter and professor at Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts.

As Frau Prof. Zuckerkandl, Amalie enjoyed a high social standing. In 1919, however, her husband divorced her. He remarried but died on July 1, 1921. The second Frau Zuckerkandl soon wed again, but Amalie was not so fortunate.