Raoul Korty

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Raoul Korty (February 9, 1889 – 1944) was an Austrian-Jewish journalist and a passionate collector of photographs. He was born in Vienna to a Jewish banking family and studied at the Vienna Academy of Arts, but left to serve in the military. In World War I he was an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army.

After the Anschluss, Korty could no longer work as a journalist because of his Jewish background, and he separated from his non-Jewish wife. He hoped to emigrate and left his large photo collection with a Viennese forwarding agency. In 1939 the Gestapo seized the collection and sent it to Austria’s National Library.

In 1944 Korty was arrested in Vienna and killed at Auschwitz. After the war his daughter sought the return of the photographs. The National Library offered to return the pictures but would not pay financial compensation. The collection was forgotten for years.

In 2003 the collection reappeared during provenance research required by Austria’s restitution laws (Art Restitution Act of 1998). The Austrian National Library bought it in 2007 and began a careful study of its 30,000 items, keeping the original order Korty had set. In 2008 an exhibition presented the findings.

Korty liked to collect portraits of famous people from the late 19th and early 20th centuries: artists, theater figures, members of the imperial family, European nobility, Viennese society, politicians and scientists. One photo album with many pictures of Emperor Franz Joseph I and his family is especially well preserved.