Ursula Lena Ucicky (née Kohn) | R.I.P. 1922-2025

Ursula Lena Ucicky was born in Cottbus in 1922. Her Jewish father, Heinrich Kohn, originally from Brno, owned shares in a cloth factory in Forst/Lausitz, then known as the “Manchester of Germany.” During the Nazi era, the factory and its assets were confiscated, Ursula Lena Kohn was expelled from public schools and declared “stateless.” In Hamburg, she narrowly survived the firestorm triggered by British bombers in response to German attacks on London. After the liberation of the German harbour city in 1945, Ursula Lena Kohn was hired by the British military government as a senior assistant. After months in Germany, she emigrated to England and later lived in a kibbutz in Israel. After several years of absence, Ursula Kohn returned to Hamburg in 1953, where she met film director and Gustav Klimt's first illegitimate son, Gustav Ucicky (1899-1961). He is known to have gained notoriety with the Nazi film Heimkehr (Homecoming, 1941, screenplay: Gerhard Menzel), while his film productions from the early Vienna Film era (including Café Elektric, 1927) and later for UfA during the Weimar Republic were forgotten.

In 1957, Ursula Lena Kohn married Klimt's illegitimate son. She was his third wife. Shortly before the wedding, Kohn, who worked as an assistant director and freelance journalist, wrote an article about Ucicky's art collection in the magazine Alte und Moderne Kunst (Old and Modern Art). After Gustav Ucicky's death in 1961, the remaining art collection became her property as part of the estate settlement.

Ursula Lena Ucicky, who lived a secluded life in Vienna, always wanted to make her collection available to the public and to conduct research into it, particularly with regard to its provenance. In 2013, as a private individual, she reached an agreement with the heirs of Jenny Steiner for Klimt's painting Wasserschlangen II (Water Serpents II, 1904, private collection, courtesy of HomeArt) in accordance with the Washington Principles. In the same year, she established the non-profit Klimt Foundation and contributed the Klimt works remaining in her possession to it. One of the foundation's first actions in 2014/15 was to research the provenance of the painting Portrait of Gertrud Loew (1902, The Lewis Collection) and reach a settlement with the heirs of Gertrud Felsövanyi.

It is with deep gratitude that we bid farewell to our founder, who, by establishing the Klimt Foundation, enabled the provenance research of her art collection and, beyond that, a wide range of research and publications on Gustav Klimt and the “Vienna 1900” era. With her open-minded approach to life, she defined the founding pillars of the foundation and had a decisive influence on our interdisciplinary way of working.