Chicago University Chapel

Luigi Kasimir was an Austro-Hungarian artist who specialized in engravings of landscapes and architectural studies. He travelled widely in Europe and North America seeking subjects and was noted for his innovative work in colored etchings. By employing multiple plates to produce a single print, he was able to obtain greater control and precision in the juxtaposition of color fields, a refinement evident in this image of the University of Chicago’s Rockefeller Memorial Chapel. Most of Kasimir’s work, including this print, is undated, but two of the buildings depicted here, the Rockefeller Memorial Chapel and the Chicago Theological Seminary Building (now Saieh Hall for Economics) were finished in 1928. No later buildings appear in any of Kasimir’s American subjects, which, combined with his known pivot from art-making to art-dealing in Austria in the late 1930s, allows us to date this etching to between 1928 and 1938. We do not know when this print was purchased, but at least five other works by Kasimir formed part of the Booth family collections from the 1920s to the 1940s.

Kasimir’s best known work is his etching of the ruins of the Roman Forum, of which one print belonged to Dr. Sigmund Freud, who hung it above the examination couch in his consulting room. Kasimir also designed a bookplate for Dr. Freud. Other prints by Kasimir are now in many museum collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Albertina in Vienna, and the British Museum. A prolific artist, he left some 2,500 copper etching plates at his death in 1962.

Luigi Kasimir’s modest fame as an artist is counterbalanced by personal infamy. In 1933, Kasimir joined the already-banned Austrian branch of the Nazi party. When Germany took control of Austria in 1938, the new Aryanization laws allowed Kasimir to seize ownership of Gall and Goldmann, the Jewish-owned art gallery that had represented him. The gallery’s former owner, the widow Elsa Gall, escaped to the United States the same year, but was never compensated for the loss of her business. Kasimir and his business partner Ernst Edhoffer subsequently bought several major art collections from Austrian Jewish families, who were forced to sell them for a fraction of their real value. Restitution claims for some works extorted from Jewish collectors by Kasimir and Edhoffer are still unresolved today. After the end of the war, Kasimir hid the remaining artworks from the gallery’s holdings in his apartment. They were found there in 1947, while Kasimir was serving an eighteen-month sentence for his unlawful self-enrichment during the Nazi period.

The work of Luigi Kasimir embodies the uncomfortable truth that someone can be a bigot, a thief, a liar—and an artist. Engaging with works by artists with difficult histories complicates our conceptions of art and of humanity. Between an art print of a building on a university campus and the dispossession of a persecuted community soon to face genocide stretches the whole spectrum of human nature, from creative good to destructive evil. A work of art such as this, contextualized by its history, can be a potent catalyst for learning and personal growth.

Mariam Hale
2023-2025 Collections Fellow
Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research
January 2024