The New York Times sums up the legacy of Austrian art collector, Rudolph Leopold:
Starting in the 1950s, Dr. Leopold, an ophthalmologist by training, amassed a collection of more than 5,000 pieces, focusing on work by Austrian artists like Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt and Oskar Kokoschka. He was known in particular for bringing to wide public attention the work of Schiele (1890-1918), whose drawings of male and female nudes had long been considered decadent and even pornographic.
Dr. Leopold wrote several books on Schiele, including “Egon Schiele” (Phaidon), a large illustrated monograph published in this country in 1973. […]
By 1994, Dr. Leopold owned a vast collection valued at more than $500 million. That year, in conjunction with the Austrian government, he established a public foundation. Under the terms of the arrangement, the government paid him about a third of the collection’s value and built the museum that houses it today.
In October 1997, “Egon Schiele: The Leopold Collection,” an exhibition of about 150 works, opened at the Modern. Before the year was out, the ownership of two paintings had been called into question. […]
In interviews, Dr. Leopold denied having knowingly dealt in looted art. “I’m not a Nazi and I’m not a Nazi profiteer,” he told The Jerusalem Report in 1998. “My family were totally against Hitler’s regime.”
Rudolf Leopold, Art Collector, Dies at 85 (New York Times)
