Rudolf Leopold

Rudolf Leopold (1 March 1925 – 29 June 2010) was an Austrian art collector, whose collection of 5,000 works of art was purchased by the Government of Austria and used to create the Leopold Museum, of which he was made director for life. Claims had been made by Jewish survivors of the Holocaust that some of the pieces in the collection were Nazi plunder and should be returned to their rightful owners.

Leopold was born on 1 March 1925 in Vienna, and said in interviews that he had escaped conscription by the Nazis by hiding in a small village in a remote part of Austria. He earned his medical degree from the Medical University of Vienna.

He started actively collecting art in the mid-1950s, with a major early focus being pieces by Egon Schiele, whose works were available inexpensively at the time. Other Austrian artists who he collected included Gustav Klimt and Oskar Kokoschka. The wonder he felt from seeing the art during a 1947 visit to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, a day he called "one of the most important days in my life", led Leopold to start a collection of his own. His first acquisition was a work by Friedrich Gauermann in 1947, which he paid for in exchange for tutoring. He acquired a catalogue of Schiele's work in 1950 and became enamored with the artist's work, despite the fact that he was distinctly out of fashion. Pieces that Rudolf bought for a few dollars would later be worth hundreds of thousands.

He was especially noted for bringing public attention and appreciation to the work of Schiele, whose nude drawings had been considered pornographic at times. Leopold wrote the 1973 illustrated book Egon Schiele, which was published by Phaidon Press and included 228 of the artist's work along with selected poems.

In 1994, the Austrian government agreed to purchase the collection for one-third of its appraised value of $500 million, with the works to be displayed at what was to become the Leopold Museum in Vienna, of which he was made director for life. The museum opened to the public in 2001.

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