Rudolf Leopold, the man who "rediscovered" Schiele

Austrian art collector Rudolf Leopold, involved in the controversy surrounding paintings stolen from their Jewish owners by the Nazis, says he is a "man with an eye" and is proud to have helped rediscover the painter Egon Schiele.

Leopold has met with success recently in Vienna and Paris with two exhibitions ending late January. About 600,000 visitors saw "Vienna 1900" with paintings from Viennese collections, including his own, at the Grand Palais, while another 180,000 visited the "Impressionists from the Paris Musee d'Orsay" exhibit in Vienna's Leopold Museum.

Tall, with sparkling blue eyes and a white beard, this former ophthalmologist, who turns 81 on March 1, started acquiring art works after World War II, following only "his own subjective taste."

In 1994, he created a private foundation with his collection of over 5,000 paintings including early 20th century works by Austrian artists like Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka and Schiele.

To use it, the Austrian government then paid some 160 million euros (190 million dollars) according to the daily Der Standard, before building the Leopold Museum, since 2001 one of Vienna's main attractions.

The museum, at the heart of the 'Museumsquartier', estimates the collection is worth some 600 million euros (715 million dollars).

Surrounded by private treasures, including a Kokoschka painting, Leopold and his wife Elisabeth, whom he met at medical school, talked to AFP about his passion for collecting.

In 1947, at 22 years old and with a solid background in music -- but not in the arts "because of those stupid Nazis" -- he visited Vienna's Kunsthistorisches art museum for the first time.

"My eyes popped out of my head," he said, recalling the long moments he spent in front of works by Velasquez, Vermeer and Rembrandt.

"I have this talent for observing for hours," he said, adding "I am a master at distinguishing between the real ones and the copies."

Following this revelation, he decided to collect works by affordable painters, starting with the then-underrated Schiele. After receiving his doctorate in 1953, his mother offered him a car but he decided to spend the money on paint and ride a motorbike instead.

The works were very cheap at the time, said Elisabeth Leopold, adding "heirs were selling, an Austrian emigre in London was parting from the "Hermites," a nephew of Schiele was selling a painting hidden behind a cupboard, unaware of its value."

But although early works by Gustav Klimt inspired Leopold, his favourite remains Schiele, "the grand sketch artist of expressionism," whom he compares to Duerer and Toulouse-Lautrec.

"(Schiele) touches everyone with his themes, love, our loneliness, our fear of death, all his eroticism," being like his friend and model Klimt "possessed by sexuality," he said.

But Leopold has his critics.

Austria's artistic and political scenes were shaken late January, when an arbitration court forced the country to return five Klimt paintings, worth an estimated 250 million euros in total, to Maria Altmann, the descendant of a Jewish family whose possessions were stolen by the Nazis.

The Green party and experts like Sophie Lillie asked that a 1998 restitution law, which allowed the return of the Klimt paintings, be applied to the Leopold foundation and some of its works.

Stefan Templ, who wrote a book on the seizure of Jewish property by the Nazis, told AFP: "In the Leopold Collection there is an entire row of pictures whose origin is questionable."

According to him, the main collectors of Schiele's works were initially Viennese Jews who disappeared during the Holocaust or emigrated.

Leopold is in a legal battle to recover Schiele's "Portrait of Wally," seized at a New York exhibition in 1998 by the descendants of the previous owner, Lea Jaray-Bondi.

This was an unjustified act, said Leopold, adding that people are jealous of his success.

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AFP 151348 GMT 02 06

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