John Sailer, the founder of Galerie Ulysses in Vienna and champion of the Austrian avant-garde, was a forceful and influential advocate for the art of Germany and his home country of Austria. Sailer opened Galerie Ulysses with his associate Gabriele Wimmer in the garage area of the Federal Theaters building on Goethegasse in 1974, before moving to its present site, Opernring 21, three years later.
Over the past five decades the highly respected gallery has shown primarily Austrian artists such as Hans Hollein, Maria Lassnig, Walter Pichler, Arnulf Rainer and Fritz Wotruba, as well as works by American artists including Milton Avery, Stuart Davis, Sam Francis, Helen Frankenthaler, Roy Lichtenstein, Kenneth Noland, Jackson Pollock, Cy Twombly and Andy Warhol.
Sailer also worked to develop an interest in Austrian and German artists at leading US museums. These efforts included organising and co-publishing the catalogue for a Rainer exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City and the Menil Collection in Houston in 1992. His successful introduction of Lassnig (at age 70) to the New York market, and the continuing interest in her work in the US, was an exception to the American market’s resistance to other Austrian artists.
Sailer was a handsome man who spoke English like an American, a fluency he owed to the seven years he attended a Rudolf Steiner school in New York (1940-47). He was always well informed about the latest trends in art and usually had witty titbits to share about artists and others in our circle of friends and acquaintances.
A son of Vienna
Born in Vienna towards the end of 1937, he was barely three months old when German troops invaded Austria. Sailer’s father, a political journalist adamantly opposed to the authoritarian rule of Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg and his fascist predecessor, Engelbert Dollfuss, was not Jewish. But his wife, a lawyer concerned with social justice, was. After the Anschluss, the couple had little choice but to flee Austria, going first to Paris for two years and then, following the German invasion of France, to Montauban in Vichy France and, in September 1940, to Marseille. There, two remarkable Americans, the labour leader Frank Bohn and the classicist Varian Fry (known for his friendship with Gertrude Stein)—with the help of Hiram Bingham IV, the US vice consul in the port city—made available visas created by the Emergency Rescue Committee.
The list of 238 people fortunate enough to obtain these life-saving documents was compiled by the celebrated novelist Thomas Mann and Alfred H. Barr Jr, the first director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. (In an unfinished memoir, Sailer suggested that William Green, the president of the American Federation of Labor, and David Dubinsky, of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, may also have played a part in this rescue operation.) It is hardly surprising that in the hands of such notable intellectuals, the list included the leading writers and artists of the time: among them, Franz Werfel and his wife Alma Mahler, the Austrian writer and critic Alfred Polgar, the novelist Alfred Döblin (author of Berlin Alexanderplatz, 1929) and the artists Marc Chagall, Max Ernst and Fernand Léger. American Quakers, Unitarians and Jewish organisations all contributed to the effort, as did the Portuguese consul in Bordeaux, who issued visas for Portugal that allowed refugees to enter Spain and cross to its Iberian neighbour. In Lisbon, the Sailer family boarded the Greek ship Nea Hellas, bound for New York.
During his family’s sojourn in the US, Sailer spent the summer months in Maine with Bertha and Hans Weisz, friends of his parents, whom he referred to as “a second family”. His joy was unbounded when the Weiszes later gave him a pretty stone house on Mount Desert Island off the coast of Maine. He divided his time between Austria and the US and spent his summers in Maine, first restoring the house, and then enjoying the home he had created.
Return to Vienna
Sailer and his parents returned to Vienna in 1947. As a younger man, he studied law for a while and was as passionate about cultural politics as he was about Modern art. In 1957 he wrote for the Vienna-based newspaper Die Presse and began to collect art and the timeless bentwood furniture made by the acclaimed 19th-century Viennese maker Michael Thonet. Within a decade, Sailer’s bentwood collection was so important that it was exhibited in leading museums throughout Europe and at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University.
In 1967, the young collector attended “International Policies of the United States” at the Salzburg Global American Studies Program. Two years later, he became a member of the organisation’s advisory council and a year after that was elected chair of the council. He remained a faithful supporter of the institution throughout his life.
Sailer devoted himself wholeheartedly to his passion for contemporary art, starting with the founding of Galerie Ulysses. He played an important advisory role in the renovation of several museums, including New York’s MoMA (1978) and the Belvedere Palace in Vienna (1987). He served on the Advisory Committee for the Reorganisation of Austrian Federal Museums (1981-84) and as the Austrian commissioner for the exhibition Vienna 1900: Art, Architecture and Design at MoMA (1986).
Kiesler Prize
In 1995, Sailer began to work on the creation of the Austrian Frederick Kiesler Foundation and arranged for the acquisition of this architect’s estate. He also initiated the Austrian Frederick Kiesler Prize for Architecture and the Arts. Recipients of the prize include the architects Frank Gehry and Toyo Ito and the artists Olafur Eliasson, Bruce Nauman and Theaster Gates.
Sailer pursued civic-minded cultural projects until late in his life. He served as the chair of the university board at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and developed an architectural programme for the Museum of the 20th Century (later known as Mumok) in Vienna. In 2003, he curated and published the catalogue for the exhibition KUNST, KUNST, KUNST at the Museum of the 20th Century.
• John Sailer, born Vienna 30 November 1937; died Vienna 14 May 2025.
