Klimt's women: numbered copy
Fünfundzwanzig Handzeichnungen.
Royal folio (415 x 610 mm). 2 ff. of text and 25 collotype plates after drawings on matte art paper (7 with colours), each tipped onto thin cream card with a mount as issued. Stored in original half cloth portfolio with Klimt's gilt-printed signature on the upper cover, portfolio stored in contemporary card slipcase.
Number 434 of only 500 numbered and 10 deluxe copies. The twenty-five monochrome and coloured drawings show women in mainly erotic scenes. All were from the collection of the Austrian industrialist August Lederer and his wife Serena (a relative of the U.S. journalist Joseph Pulitzer), who together spent a fortune on compiling the most important Klimt collection of their age. Forcibly expropriated by the National Socialists in 1938, a significant part of the trove was stored at Immendorf Castle in Lower Austria, where it appears to have perished in a fire in May 1945.
Title-page a little stained in places; plates and mattes largely clean throughout. Unobtrusive early waterstain to cloth spine of the portfolio. Edges of the slipcase professionally restored.
For the history of the Lederer family and their collection see 1) Tina Marie Storkovich, Verbrannte Klimtbilder: Das Puzzle von Immendorf. In: "Die Presse", Print-Ausgabe, 19 Dec. 2015, Spectrum, p. III. 2) Michael Wladika, Egon Schiele, "Die Mutter und die Tochter" 1913. Dossier der Leopold Museum-Privatstiftung zu LM Inv. Nr. 2356.
