Leon Abramowicz was born on 18 March 1889 in Chernivtsi (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, today in Ukraine) into a Jewish family. Between 1912 and 1914, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. After periods of artistic training and further development in Switzerland and France, he settled in Vienna in 1920, where he established himself as a painter.

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In May 1938, the artist’s apartment at Schottenbastei 16 in Vienna’s first district, which he shared with his wife Marianne, was confiscated by order of the Gestapo and cleared out in the autumn of the same year. Around the same time, Abramowicz fled via Switzerland into exile in France; his wife joined him in January 1939. The war years were spent in various internment camps, hiding places, and on the run. Despite these adverse circumstances, the artist repeatedly succeeded in continuing his artistic practice.

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Abramowicz eventually returned to Vienna in 1950. While his work in exile consisted primarily of landscapes and views from the various places in which he sought refuge, his artistic focus increasingly shifted towards figurative subjects in the post-war period. Because his entire pre-1939 body of work, as well as almost all documentation of his academic training and professional status as an academically trained painter, had been lost as a result of Nazi persecution, he obtained a new diploma as an academic painter from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 1969, at the age of seventy-two.

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The artist died in his Vienna apartment in 1978. Throughout his lifetime, he received little institutional recognition. The Renner-Lanjus Collection preserves several hundred oil paintings, watercolours, and drawings by Abramowicz. These include still lifes, studio scenes, figurative works such as portraits and nudes, depictions of Jewish religious services, and landscapes. Within the collection, Abramowicz occupies a unique biographical position. His life story exemplifies the fate of many Jewish artists in the twentieth century: persecution, exile, and the difficult process of return after the end of National Socialist rule.