Klimt's faculty paintings, lost at Immendorf in 1945

On 8 May 1945, German troops left Schloss Immendorf, a castle in Lower Austria north of Vienna. The Red Army arrived a few hours later. Around six in the evening a fire started in the south-west tower. By 11 May the whole castle had burned. The castle was a wartime store for art, and it held three huge ceiling paintings that Gustav Klimt had made for the University of Vienna.

The Ministry of Education commissioned Klimt and Franz Matsch in 1894 to decorate the university’s Great Hall. Klimt took three subjects: Philosophy, Medicine and Jurisprudence, each about 430 by 300 centimetres. Philosophy was shown in 1900 and won a gold medal at the Paris World Fair. Professors protested, and critics attacked the nudity. In April 1905 Klimt withdrew from the commission. The state agreed to cancel it if he repaid an advance of 30,000 crowns. August Lederer, an industrialist, and his wife Serena, who were Klimt’s patrons, supplied the money. In return they received Philosophy. The painter Koloman Moser bought Medicine and Jurisprudence. In 1919 the Österreichische Galerie, now the Belvedere, bought Medicine, and August Lederer bought Jurisprudence.

Under Nazi rule the Lederer collection was seized. On 26 November 1938 the authorities “secured” 209 objects in Serena Lederer’s Vienna flat under an export-ban law; Jurisprudence was item 111. Sources give the final taking as 1939 or 1940. Serena Lederer died in Budapest in 1943, and her daughter Elisabeth Bachofen-Echt died in Vienna in 1944. Klimt’s portrait of Elisabeth has its own entry on this site.

In early 1943 Baldur von Schirach, the Nazi governor of Vienna, staged a Klimt show in which the faculty paintings were hung. Die Presse reports that the two Lederer pictures were taken off their frames and rolled that March, then sent to Immendorf. Medicine, owned by the state gallery, went there too. Who owned Philosophy and Jurisprudence then is disputed. The University of Vienna history site says Schirach bought them with ministry funds. Die Presse says he bought them from Elisabeth. Lost Art says the gallery acquired Jurisprudence in 1944.

The cause of the fire is not proved, and no source names a person. A 1946 police report, quoted in a 2025 article, says an SS demolition unit left at 11 a.m. and that a planned fire with timed detonators was “not unlikely”. The Lexikon der Provenienzforschung says many reports blame German troops, probably SS, but that this cannot be proved. It finds no sign that Soviet soldiers started it. The Austrian National Library says a Feldherrnhalle unit hid timed charges in the four towers, and also calls the events unclear. The Belvedere says withdrawing German troops set the fire, and the University of Vienna says SS units did. The MAK and the Klimt Foundation say the events are not fully clarified.

All three paintings are counted as burned. That is the general view, not a finding: nothing from the Immendorf lists has turned up, and some researchers suspect that works left the castle before or during the fire. The Library argues that the size of the canvases made a quick rescue unlikely. Only black-and-white photographs remain, and one 1931 colour plate of a single figure from Medicine. In 2021 Google Arts and Culture and the Belvedere published colour versions made with machine learning. The Belvedere says they are an approximation, not an authentic record. A 2025 exhibition at the MAK, titled Burnt, Destroyed, Vanished?, kept the question open.