Portrait of a Young Boy; Study for an Unrealised Portrait of George R. von Halban-Kurz

1917, Pencil, red crayon with white chalk heightening on paper, 595 x 469 mm, Strobl 2737

Provenance:

Selma Kurz & Josef Halban, Vienna (who had commissioned the portrait from the artist)

Wienerroither & Kohlbacher, Vienna

Private collection (1998)

Private collection (as a gift from the former)

Christie’s, London (2018)

Private collection, Austria

Literature:

Alice Strobl, Gustav Klimt. Die Zeichnungen, vol. III: 1912–1918, Salzburg: Verlag Galerie Welz, 1984, pp. 131, 152–153, no. 2737 (illus.).

Österreichische Meister der Klassischen Moderne, exh. cat., Vienna: Wienerroither & Kohlbacher Edition, 1998, no. 22 (illus.)

A painted portrait of the young George von Halban-Kurz (1911–98), commissioned by his parents, the eminent Viennese gynaecologist Josef von Halban and the world-renowned soprano Selma Kurz, was perhaps intended to mark the family’s only recent acquisition of a patent of nobility. Klimt’s death, within months of the execution of the drawn study, would have invested this relic of the occasion with a particular poignancy. In the late 1930s George left Austria for the United States, where for over two decades he had a most distinguished military career. Returning to Europe in the 1960s, he first settled in Munich, where he studied History, moving back to Vienna, and becoming a novelist, only towards the end of his life.