Wilhelm Thöny

On 4 March 1948 a fire at a storage warehouse in New York destroyed about a thousand paintings and works on paper by Wilhelm Thöny, gathered there ahead of an exhibition. It was most of his life's work. He died the following year, in May 1949.

Thöny came from Graz, in southern Austria, where he was born in 1888. He trained at the Munich Academy, was among the founders of the Munich New Secession, a breakaway exhibiting society, and formed a lifelong friendship with the draughtsman Alfred Kubin. Back home he became the first president of the Graz Secession in 1923. In 1931 he moved to Paris, and in 1937 he won a gold medal at the Paris World's Fair for a portrait of the city's archbishop, Cardinal Verdier.

New York had caught his eye earlier. He visited Manhattan in 1933, and the Belvedere's View of Manhattan, painted on cardboard in 1936, shows the East River two years before he moved there. He emigrated in 1938 with his wife Thea, who was Jewish, the daughter of the American painter Frank Herrmann. In the 1940s his work was shown at the Brooklyn Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago, and from 1942 it was handled by Knoedler, a leading New York gallery.