John Sailer, the founding father of Galerie Ulysses in Vienna and champion of the Austrian avant-garde, was a forceful and influential advocate for the artwork of Germany and his house nation of Austria. Sailer opened Galerie Ulysses along with his affiliate Gabriele Wimmer within the storage space of the Federal Theaters constructing on Goethegasse in 1974, earlier than transferring to its current website, Opernring 21, three years later.
Over the previous 5 a long time the extremely revered gallery has proven primarily Austrian artists equivalent to Hans Hollein, Maria Lassnig, Walter Pichler, Arnulf Rainer and Fritz Wotruba, in addition to works by American artists together with Milton Avery, Stuart Davis, Sam Francis, Helen Frankenthaler, Roy Lichtenstein, Kenneth Noland, Jackson Pollock, Cy Twombly and Andy Warhol.
Sailer additionally labored to develop an curiosity in Austrian and German artists at main US museums. These efforts included organising and co-publishing {the catalogue} for a Rainer exhibition on the Guggenheim Museum in New York Metropolis and the Menil Assortment in Houston in 1992. His profitable introduction of Lassnig (at age 70) to the New York market, and the persevering with curiosity in her work within the US, was an exception to the American market’s resistance to different Austrian artists.
Sailer was a good-looking man who spoke English like an American, a fluency he owed to the seven years he attended a Rudolf Steiner college in New York (1940-47). He was at all times effectively knowledgeable concerning the newest developments in artwork and normally had witty titbits to share about artists and others in our circle of buddies and acquaintances.
A son of Vienna
Born in Vienna in direction of the top of 1937, he was barely three months previous when German troops invaded Austria. Sailer’s father, a political journalist adamantly against the authoritarian rule of Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg and his fascist predecessor, Engelbert Dollfuss, was not Jewish. However his spouse, a lawyer involved with social justice, was. After the Anschluss, the couple had little alternative however to flee Austria, going first to Paris for 2 years after which, following the German invasion of France, to Montauban in Vichy France and, in September 1940, to Marseille. There, two outstanding People, the labour chief Frank Bohn and the classicist Varian Fry (identified for his friendship with Gertrude Stein)—with the assistance of Hiram Bingham IV, the US vice consul within the port metropolis—made obtainable visas created by the Emergency Rescue Committee.
The checklist of 238 individuals lucky sufficient to acquire these life-saving paperwork was compiled by the celebrated novelist Thomas Mann and Alfred H. Barr Jr, the primary director of the Museum of Trendy Artwork (MoMA) in New York. (In an unfinished memoir, Sailer recommended that William Inexperienced, the president of the American Federation of Labor, and David Dubinsky, of the Worldwide Women Garment Staff Union, may additionally have performed an element on this rescue operation.) It’s hardly shocking that within the arms of such notable intellectuals, the checklist included the main writers and artists of the time: amongst them, Franz Werfel and his spouse Alma Mahler, the Austrian author and critic Alfred Polgar, the novelist Alfred Döblin (writer of Berlin Alexanderplatz, 1929) and the artists Marc Chagall, Max Ernst and Fernand Léger. American Quakers, Unitarians and Jewish organisations all contributed to the hassle, as did the Portuguese consul in Bordeaux, who issued visas for Portugal that allowed refugees to enter Spain and cross to its Iberian neighbour. In Lisbon, the Sailer household boarded the Greek ship Nea Hellas, sure for New York.
Throughout his household’s sojourn within the US, Sailer spent the summer time months in Maine with Bertha and Hans Weisz, buddies of his dad and mom, whom he known as “a second household”. His pleasure was unbounded when the Weiszes later gave him a reasonably stone home on Mount Desert Island off the coast of Maine. He divided his time between Austria and the US and spent his summers in Maine, first restoring the home, after which having fun with the house he had created.
Return to Vienna
Sailer and his dad and mom returned to Vienna in 1947. As a youthful man, he studied regulation for some time and was as obsessed with cultural politics as he was about Trendy artwork. In 1957 he wrote for the Vienna-based newspaper Die Presse and commenced to gather artwork and the timeless bentwood furnishings made by the acclaimed Nineteenth-century Viennese maker Michael Thonet. Inside a decade, Sailer’s bentwood assortment was so vital that it was exhibited in main museums all through Europe and on the Carpenter Middle for the Visible Arts at Harvard College.
In 1967, the younger collector attended “Worldwide Insurance policies of america” on the Salzburg World American Research Program. Two years later, he turned a member of the organisation’s advisory council and a yr after that was elected chair of the council. He remained a devoted supporter of the establishment all through his life.
Sailer devoted himself wholeheartedly to his ardour for modern artwork, beginning with the founding of Galerie Ulysses. He performed an vital advisory position within the renovation of a number of museums, together with New York’s MoMA (1978) and the Belvedere Palace in Vienna (1987). He served on the Advisory Committee for the Reorganisation of Austrian Federal Museums (1981-84) and because the Austrian commissioner for the exhibition Vienna 1900: Artwork, Structure and Design at MoMA (1986).
Kiesler Prize
In 1995, Sailer started to work on the creation of the Austrian Frederick Kiesler Basis and organized for the acquisition of this architect’s property. He additionally initiated the Austrian Frederick Kiesler Prize for Structure and the Arts. Recipients of the prize embrace the architects Frank Gehry and Toyo Ito and the artists Olafur Eliasson, Bruce Nauman and Theaster Gates.
Sailer pursued civic-minded cultural tasks till late in his life. He served because the chair of the college board on the College of Utilized Arts Vienna and developed an architectural programme for the Museum of the twentieth Century (later often called Mumok) in Vienna. In 2003, he curated and printed {the catalogue} for the exhibition KUNST, KUNST, KUNST on the Museum of the twentieth Century.
• John Sailer, born Vienna 30 November 1937; died Vienna 14 Could 2025.
