Leo Abramowicz

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

Early life 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), 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.

Career as an artist After serving in the First World War 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 under Karl Sterrer. Their apartment and its entire contents were confiscated in 1938. The inventory of the apartment and studio, including the entire artistic oeuvre since 1918, an estimated 600 oil paintings and 7,000 works on paper, copies after old masters, magnificent original costumes that Abramowicz had used for his works, a small collection of paintings by modern painters and several projection and photographic cameras were confiscated and forcibly sold. Their whereabouts are unknown. In July 1943, the wife was captured by the Nazis and taken to the Gurs concentration camp. Abramowicz was arrested during a raid in August 1943 and sent to a camp in Toulouse. He and his wife managed to escape and lived underground with the help of a Jewish refugee committee until the liberation of the country. Porträt Maria Abramowicz (Öl auf Karton, 381 × 47,3 cm, um 1948) Selbstporträt (Öl auf Leinwand, 100 × 65 cm) Blumenstillleben (Öl auf Leinwand, 80 × 60 cm; um 1935/1938) Das Künstlerehepaar Abramowicz (Öl auf Leinwand, 63 × 46 cm) Blumenstillleben (Öl auf Leinwand, 62,2 × 42,5 cm)

Literature Karl Heinz Ritschel: Leon Abramowicz. 1889–1978. Ein Maler aus der „verschollenen Generation“. Winter Verlag, Salzburg, 1980 Sophie Lillie: Was einmal war. Handbuch der enteigneten Kunstsammlungen Wiens. Czernin Verlag, Wien, 2003, S. 29/39