A painting by Egon Schiele depicting the artist’s uncle and legal guardian has been rediscovered after being missing for more than 90 years, a museum has said.
Leopold Czihaczek at the Piano (1907) was found within a Viennese private collection and will go on public display for the first time at the Leopold Museum in Austria, which houses the largest and most eminent collection of works by the great expressionist.
The piece will be a part of the museum’s non-fungible tokens (NFT) collection of 24 paintings and drawings by Schiele, produced in partnership with LaCollection – a new NFT platform dedicated to museum collections. Funds from the NFT collection will go towards the painting’s restoration and expansion of the museum’s Schiele collection.
Recognised as one of the most formative and colourful figures of Viennese modernism, Schiele managed to create a groundbreaking body of work before his death from flu at the age of 28 during the 1918 pandemic.
The Leopold Museum’s founder, Rudolf Leopold, was one of the most important patrons of Schiele’s work and is credited with being largely responsible for his fame.
Leopold Czihaczek at the Piano was painted shortly before Schiele’s 17th birthday. It is impressionist in style, with a muted palette characteristic of his early work.
Czihaczek became Schiele’s legal guardian after the death of Schiele’s father when the artist was 15. He is depicted in the painting as a bourgeois figure and man of culture – an ode to the role he was to play in the young artist’s life.
Verena Gamper from the Leopold Museum Research Center said: “The painting shows Egon Schiele’s uncle and legal guardian, Leopold Czihaczek (1842-1929), playing the piano in his apartment in Vienna’s Leopoldstadt district.
“Following the untimely death of Egon’s father, Adolf Schiele, Czihaczek had assumed Schiele’s guardianship.”
The last record of Leopold Czihaczek at the Piano can be traced to Rudolf Leopold’s 1972 catalogue raisonné of the artist. According to Gamper, it was previously only known from preliminary studies and a black and white photograph from 1930 showing a room in which it hung.
“Since then, there was no evidence if the painting still existed or if it had been permanently lost,” she said. “It was such a thrilling moment seeing this poorly documented and presumably untraceable work materialise, when the owners of the painting contacted us and I realised what kind of treasure they were talking about.”
The NFT collection will reflect subjects at the heart of Schiele’s work that continue to resonate today, including gender and androgyny, self-identity and psychological struggle. “As one of the most revered but controversial modern painters for the disturbing intensity and raw sexuality of his painting, the NFTs provide an opportunity to collect works that elicited a strong visceral reaction in viewers when first shown in 1906,” the museum said.
NFTs – unique digital assets stored on a blockchain – have gripped the arts sector since the digital artist Mike Winkelmann, better known as Beeple, made history last year by selling an NFT for $69.4m.
Hans-Peter Wipplinger, the director of the Leopold Museum, said: “Leopold Czihaczek at the Piano is a masterpiece of Schiele’s early work … The current owners have agreed to place the painting at the disposal of the Leopold Museum as a permanent loan.
“Following its cleaning and restoration, we will have the chance to make it accessible to the public as part of our permanent presentation on Vienna 1900 and within the museum’s unique collection of paintings and drawings by Schiele.”
