Fritz Schwarz-Waldegg

From 1925 to 1927 Fritz Schwarz-Waldegg was president of the Hagenbund, the liberal Vienna artists' society that showed many of the city's Expressionists. Born Friedrich Schwarz in Vienna in 1889 to a Jewish family, he trained at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts and knew Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka as a young man. After 1918 he was one of the painters who carried Austrian Expressionism into the 1920s, with portraits, figure groups and landscapes built from hard, angular forms.

The Belvedere holds his painting Denomination from 1920, a title that sits close to his own life. During the First World War, in which he served as a volunteer with a Viennese infantry regiment, he converted to Catholicism, with his family's approval.

The conversion did not protect him. After the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938 he was barred from working, and the Hagenbund was dissolved. In August 1942 he was taken from his sister's flat and deported from Vienna's Aspang station on the 31st, most likely to Maly Trostinec near Minsk, where he was presumably murdered on arrival on 4 September.