The Gallia and Langer apartments

As we are all spending so much time in our own homes, Wendy Hughes Chuck has written about the furniture from two apartments, which became part of the NGV collection, from a past period of dangerous and chaotic times. Thank you to Wendy for a wonderful read.

The story behind the Gallia and Langer Apartments

I did not guide in ‘Vienna Art & Design’ – the wonderful Melbourne Winter Masterpieces show of 2011 because I was still a trainee guide at the time.  But the beautiful paintings by Kiimt, Schiele and Kokoschka, the decorative arts of the Wiener Werkstätte (with work by artists and designers like Koloman Moser and Dagobert Peche), as well as the Gallia and Langer apartments (which are now on display on Level 2 of NGVI) have remained in my memory.  They inspired me to often include the Viennese Secession period in my NGVI Collection Tours.

In particular I was intrigued by the story of how the furniture designed by rival Viennese architects/designers, Josef Hoffmann (1870-1956) and Adolf Loos (1870-1933) and commissioned by two families of cousins, the Gallias and the Langers, with opposing tastes in art and design, all ended up in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria.

The Gallia Family

The Gallia children featured in the painting (above) by Ferdinand Andri were the children of a wealth Viennese businessman, Moriz Gallia, and his wife, Hermine. They are son Erni b.1895, daughter Margarete (Gretl) b.1896 and twins, Lene and Käthe b.1899.

Moriz and his brother, Adolf, a patent lawyer, made their fortune via their business links to a scientist, Auer von Welsbach, the inventor of the gas mantle and the metal filament light bulb.  Moriz and his wife Hermine were Jews from Moravia who settled in Vienna, made a fortune, converted to Christianity, and had their children baptised. They were patrons of the revolutionary Viennese Secession art movement and the Wiener Werkstätte Workshop, and great supporters of the architect and designer, Josef Hoffman.  In 1913 they commissioned Hoffmann to design the interiors and furniture of the public rooms of their modern apartment in Wohllebengasse (trans. Good Living Street) in central Vienna close to the Belvedere Museum which today houses many portraits by Gustav Klimt.

The apartment in Good Living Street

The Gallia Apartment furniture we can see now on Level 2 of NGVI consists of much of the furniture commissioned from Hoffmann via the Wiener Werkstätte Workshop for the four public rooms of the family apartment in Good Living Street. This consisted of heavy ebonised wood furniture in the entrance hall, the dining room and the smoking room, and more delicate white painted wood furniture for Hermine’s boudoir including the vitrine and worktable shown below.

The Gallias paid Gustav Klimt, Vienna’s leading portrait artist, 10,000 crowns in 1904 to paint the portrait of Hermine. The painting, which now hangs in the National Gallery in London, was borrowed for our exhibition in 2011. In 1901 Ferdinand Andri had painted Moriz’s portrait which hung alongside Klimt’s portrait of Hermine in the boudoir of the apartment.

There are a series of black and white photographs of the furniture in situ in the Good Living Street apartment which can be seen in the NGV display hanging next to the dining room furniture. These give us an impression of the luxurious modern ambience that Hoffmann created for the Gallias.

How the Gallia’s art and furniture reached Australia

By the time Adolf Hitler’s Nazis marched into Vienna in March 1938 Moriz and Hermine were deceased. The family’s earlier conversion to Christianity did not wash with the Nazis and their children were the victims of the antisemitism which led to the Holocaust. Their daughter, Käthe, a scientist, was dismissed from her job and imprisoned for a while. On 12 November 1938, two days after Kristallnacht, the sisters, Gretl and Käthe, (twin sister, Lene, had died in 1926) and Gretl’s daughter, Annelore, set sail for Sydney with the family furniture, paintings and Wiener Werkstätte objets d’art. The Central Office for Monuments Protection allowed them to take their Hoffmann and Wiener Werkstätte collection as only the work of artists who had been dead for over 20 years was of interest. Not even the Klimt portrait of Hermine was considered to be of value, because Hermine was Jewish.

The Gallias in Sydney

Gretl, Käthe (now Kathe) and 16-year-old Annelore (now Anne) settled in a small flat in Cremorne in Sydney crammed full of the Hoffmann furniture as well as the Klimt painting of Hermine. Anne later married and her two sons, Tim and Bruce, remember visiting the flat and playing among the heavy black ebonised furniture, having no idea of its value.

In 1976 it was decided to sell the furniture, but Anne did not want it to be split into lots and negotiations were conducted through NGV curator, Terence Lane, for the NGV to acquire the entire apartment. The Klimt portrait was sold separately to the National Gallery in London in 1976 and remains the only Klimt work in the United Kingdom. The whole story can be read in much more detail in Anne’s son, Tim Bonyhady’s, excellent book, Good Living Street: The Fortunes of My Viennese Family. A copy can be found in the Guides’ Library.

The Langer Apartment

The NGV’s second Viennese apartment, the Langer Apartment, is displayed next to the Gallia Apartment. In 1902, Melanie Gallia, a niece of Moriz and Hermine, married Jakob Langer, who went on to become the director of one of Vienna’s major banks. They were familiar with the work of Hoffmann’s rival and critic, Adolf Loos, as Jakob’s brother, Leopold had commissioned him to design his apartment the previous year. The two Langer commissions were among Loos’ earliest domestic work.  The Loos designs were installed in the newlyweds’ apartment in Lobkowitzplatz, located just about 150 metres from the rear of the Vienna Opera house.

Loos was a strident critic of Hoffmann’s insistence of designing everything for his clients, a practice he called Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art).  He favoured simplicity of design, and even published an essay in 1913 entitled “Ornament and Crime”, attacking his rivals. At the same time, he admired traditional English designs such as Thomas Chippendale and George Hepplewhite as well as traditional Viennese Biedermeier designs.

In the Langer Apartment much use is made of mahogany panelling with brass fittings. The largest piece consists of a long case clock with panelling, together with a room divider and a desk with a projecting leather top. A search on the NGV website reveals many more items not currently on display such as bedroom chairs, a night cupboard, a bookcase, a wardrobe, a cupboard and a crystal drinking set.

How the Langer Apartment came into the NGV Collection

The Adolf Loos furniture left Austria with Liesl, Melanie Langer’s daughter who shipped it to Australia in 1939. Melanie’s granddaughter and Liesl’s niece, Sue Course,  describes in her recently published book, Lost Letters from Vienna  how the furniture was incorporated into an Australian house: “installing these sophisticated Viennese furnishings, designed for colossal spaces, into their average, brick suburban dwelling with two small bedrooms to the rear of their milk bar. One of the pieces was a built-in two-metre high mahogany wall panelling structure consisting of a room divider, long case clock and sideboard. —–Erich and Liesl needed to remove some of the wall panelling to make it fit into their small kitchen-dining area. They engaged a handyman who redeployed that mahogany panelling as ill-fitting door fronts for storage cupboards. The leftovers were stored in a bungalow behind the house. ——Eventually their son Alf rescued it and used it in his law offices for 25 years.”

Once again, Terence Lane, a senior curator at the NGV came to the rescue. After inspecting the furniture, he asked if it could be on loan to the NGV for a two-week exhibition of Austrian art and design. To quote Alf, “Terence painstakingly figured out how to put the mahogany squares back together again and had them restored to their rightful place between the buffet and the grandfather clock.”

Liesl moved into a nursing home in 1993 and Alf moved the Langer apartment pieces to his home in Queensland. He writes, “I soon realised that the heat and humidity of the sub-tropics was no place for 90-year old Austrian furniture. I called Terence and asked him if the NGV was still interested. He replied immediately, ‘I’ll send up a furniture truck.’”

According to Alf, Paul Asenbaum who was considered the world’s leading Secession expert surprised the family by telling them that they possessed the largest private collection of Loos furniture in the world. The Langer Apartment joined the Gallia Apartment in the NGV in 1994.

This article is based on three books listed below. My thanks to the authors.

Bibliography (All available in the NGV Guides’ Library)

Vienna: Art & Design, NGV exhibition catalogue, 2011

Good Living Street: The Fortunes of my Viennese Family, Tim Bonyhady, 2011, Allen & Unwin

Lost Letters from Vienna, Sue Course, 2019, Wild Dingo Press