The Galerie St. Etienne to Transition into The St. Etienne Foundation

After 80 years of championing German and Austrian expressionism and self- taught American artists, Galerie St. Etienne will be transitioning into a fully non-profit organization named The St. Etienne Foundation by the end of 2020.

The recently formed St. Etienne Foundation will assist with museum exhibitions and scholarship on artists who have traditionally been associated with the gallery—such as Sue Coe, Richard Gerstl, Gustav Klimt, Käthe Kollwitz, Alfred Kubin, Anna Mary Robertson (“Grandma”) Moses and Egon Schiele. A separate foundation, the Kallir Research Institute, was established in 2017 to publish digital catalogues raisonnés. “Scholarship has always been integral to the Galerie St. Etienne’s mission,” says gallery and foundation director Jane Kallir. “However, it is no secret that mid-sized galleries such as ours have difficulty competing in today’s global marketplace, and the increased emphasis on investment is antithetical to our philosophy. We felt we had to choose between dealing and scholarship. We chose scholarship.”

Among the St. Etienne Foundation’s first projects will be Grandma Moses exhibitions in Japan, to open at Tokyo’s Setagaya Museum in November 2020, and Washington, DC at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2023-24. The Foundation also plans to digitize the Galerie St. Etienne’s extensive archives so they may be more readily be accessed by scholars. The Kallir Research Institute, which launched a digital update of Jane Kallir’s catalogue raisonné of Egon Schiele’s oils, prints, sculpture and sketchbooks in October 2018 (egonschieleonline.org), will be releasing an updated online catalogue of the artist’s roughly 3,000 watercolors and drawings in 2020. Subsequent digital catalogues raisonnés will cover the work of Richard Gerstl and Grandma Moses.

The Galerie St. Etienne will conclude its series of 80th anniversary celebrations with “The Expressionist Legacy,” featuring paintings, watercolors and drawings by Max Beckmann, Lovis Corinth, Richard Gerstl, Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Marie-Louise Motesiczky and Egon Schiele. Including loans from the Morgan Library, the National Gallery of Art and over a dozen private collectors, the exhibition will run from October 22, 2019, through February 29, 2020. Three further gallery exhibitions are planned for 2020, including a Sue Coe show timed to coincide with the presidential election.