Full Name: Benesch, Heinrich
Gender: male
Date Born: 1862
Date Died: 1947
Place Born: Hungary
Place Died: Vienna, Vienna state, Austria
Home Country/ies: Austria
Subject Area(s): Austrian, drawings (visual works), Expressionist (style), and painting (visual works)
Career(s): art collectors
Overview
Early collector of Egon Schiele, wrote a memoir of the artist. Benesch was a railroad administrator in Vienna for the southern line. Although the position was not a particularly lucrative one, he collected contemporary Austrian art. Early on he befriended the Austrian expressionist artist Egon Schiele and became one of his earliest patrons. Schiele painted a combined portrait of him and his son in 1913 (Doppelbildnis H. Benesch und Sohn, Neue Galerie der Stadt Linz, Wolfgang Gurlitt Museum, Inventory 12). In 1943, after his son’s exile, Benesch wrote a brief memoir of his experience with Schiele. Benesch’s son was an eminent art historian Otto Benesch, whose wife published the manuscript in 1965.
Selected Bibliography
Mein Weg mit Egon Schiele. Edited by Eva Benesch. New York: Verlag der Johannespresse, 1965.
Sources
Wendland, Ulrike. Biographisches Handbuch deutschsprachiger Kunsthistoriker im Exil: Leben und Werk der unter dem Nationalsozialismus verfolgten und vertriebenen Wissenschaftler. Munich: Saur, 1999, pp. 32; Mein Weg mit Egon Schiele. Edited by Eva Benesch. New York: Verlag der Johannespresse, 1965.