Galerie St. Etienne

The story

The gallery's name is a piece of coded grief: when Otto Kallir fled Vienna after the 1938 Nazi invasion, he named his Paris refuge after the cathedral near his original Neue Galerie, carrying the old address into exile. Kallir had already surrendered one dream — aeronautical engineering, abandoned after antisemitism at Vienna's Technische Hochschule — before building a gallery life instead. He opened the Neue Galerie in 1923 with the first major posthumous Egon Schiele exhibition. By 1939 he moved again, this time to New York. His granddaughter Jane runs the gallery today at 24 West 57th Street.