Jenny (Eugenie) Pulitzer, one of the four daughters of Sigmund and Charlotte Pulitzer, married the manufacturer Wilhelm Steiner in Budapest in April 1886; he was a co-owner of the silk manufacturer Gebrüder Steiner KG, founded in 1881 and located at Westbahnstraße 21, in Vienna’s 7th district. The company produced silk, artificial silk, cotton and rayon fabrics, tie and dress fabrics, and scarves in Vienna, Wels and Grulich (Králíky, Czech Republic). The Steiners had five children: their daughter Gertrude, born in 1887, died of meningitis at the age of 13; their daughter Daisy, who later married and took the name Hellmann, was born in 1890; and their son Georg, born in 1895, died in 1926. In 1901 came the twins Klara (later married to the Berlin music director Andre Mertens) and Anna (married name Weinberg), who was to be the only member of the family to return to Vienna after the end of the Nazi regime. Since December 1915, the family had lived on the bel étage of the Palais Colloredo-Mannsfeld at 8 Zedlitzgasse in Vienna’s city centre. Following the death of her husband on 15 July 1922, Jenny Steiner continued to run the thriving business, which employed over 1,000 people, together with her nephew Albert Steiner; the daughters held shares in the company. Like her sister Serena Lederer, she was an important patron of Gustav Klimt and a supporter of the Vienna Secession. In 1888, Klimt immortalised all four Pulitzer sisters (Irma, Aranka, Jenny and Serena) in his painting The Auditorium of the Old Burgtheater and later painted portraits of several family members (Gertrude Steiner, Ria Munk, Charlotte Pulitzer, Serena Lederer, Elisabeth Bachofen-Echt). Jenny Steiner’s art collection included, alongside drawings and paintings by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, works by Tina Blau, Isidor Kaufmann, Rudolf von Alt, Josef Kriehuber, Eugen Jettl, Old Masters, as well as religious paintings and sculptures. She appeared as a lender for exhibitions on several occasions before 1938. Jenny Steiner’s daughters also owned art collections.

Following the annexation of Austria to the German Reich in March 1938, Jenny Steiner was forced into hiding after her passport had been confiscated and an official travel ban imposed. Her daughters Klara and Anna entered into a marriage of convenience with a French (Marcello Grossi) and an English (Charles Weinberg) citizen respectively. Jenny travelled with her daughter Anna and Anna’s daughter from a previous marriage initially to Świnoujście (Poland); in the summer of 1938, the entire family met in Paris before Klara emigrated to New York and Anna and Daisy to Brazil. Jenny Steiner, who had to remain in Paris due to a lack of exit papers, fled via Nice to Portugal following the invasion of France, from where she was able to emigrate with a Czechoslovakian visa to Brazil in July 1941. In December 1941, with the help of her second cousin Joseph Pulitzer, an American publisher and founder of the Pulitzer Prize, she joined her daughter Klara in New York, where she lived until her death.

In May 1938, the Property Transfer Office appointed Franz Adalbert as provisional administrator for the firm Gebrüder Steiner KG. The shares held by Jenny Steiner and her daughters were ‘Aryanised’ through the Kontrollbank and transferred to Friederike Steiner, widow of Albert Steiner, who had taken his own life in May 1938, and to the authorised signatory Josef Kober. The company henceforth operated under the name Steiner und Kober. After the end of the Nazi regime, under the management of the public administrator Hans Waldhauser, it came under the supervision of the American Allies. In 1949, Josef Kober and Friederike Steiner reached a settlement with Jenny Steiner and her three daughters before the Restitution Commission at the Vienna Regional Court for Civil Matters, restoring the shareholdings that had existed prior to 1938.

On 14 October 1938, the Property Transfer Office seized the household furnishings and all the works of art belonging to Jenny Steiner and her daughter Klara, who was living with her. An attempt to take the collection out of the country failed. At the instigation of the Innere Stadt-Ost tax office, criminal proceedings were initiated (Section 9 of the Reich Flight Tax Act) and all domestic assets were confiscated to cover RM 1.5 million in Reichsfluchtsteuer (Reich Flight Tax). The household furnishings and art collection were sold at the Dorotheum in 1940/41 for the benefit of the German Reich. Klimt’s painting Water Snakes came into the possession of the Nazi director Gustav Ucicky, the godson of the art dealer Robert Herzig, following the intervention of Gauleiter Josef Bürckel. The painting Saint Jerome in a Forest Landscape by Alessandro Magnasco was purchased at auction by the merchant Dieram Papaziam, who was later able to retain the painting following a rejection of his restitution claim in 1949. In 1941, the Vienna City History Museum purchased the Klimt painting Mäda Primavesi at auction. Schiele’s Mother with Two Children III, which bore the stigma of “degenerate art”, was placed in the custody of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts in Vienna. The Schiele painting Houses by the Sea was acquired by Josefine Ernst, whose son sold it in 1955 to Rudolf Leopold, who donated it to the Leopold Museum Private Foundation in 1994. The painting Landhaus am Attersee by Klimt, also auctioned at the Dorotheum, came into the possession of Emma Danzinger at an unknown date prior to 1978; she bequeathed it to the Austrian Gallery Belvedere in her will in 1994. The Gothic wooden relief The Departure of the Apostles, created in 1520, was acquired for the “Sonderauftrag Linz” and returned to Jenny Steiner in 1949.

After 1945, Jenny Steiner made intensive efforts to secure the restitution of her art collection. In 1950, the City of Vienna voluntarily returned Mäda Primavesi to Jenny Steiner (after the Restitution Commission had ruled against its return). The painting is now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, having been donated by Klara and Andre Mertens. Mother with 2 Children III was returned in November 1950 following a restitution settlement between Jenny Steiner and the Austrian Association of Visual Artists and was sold by Steiner to the Austrian Gallery. She bequeathed the proceeds of the sale, amounting to 20,000 schillings, to her daughter Anna Weinberg, who had returned to Vienna. Jenny Steiner died in New York in 1958; in accordance with her last will and testament, she was buried alongside her late husband in the family vault at Vienna’s Central Cemetery.

Following the enactment of the Austrian Art Restitution Act in 1998, several paintings from Steiner’s collection became the subject of restitution claims, either for the first time or once again. In October 2000, the Art Restitution Advisory Board recommended the restitution of the painting Landhaus am Attersee from the Belvedere, but not that of the painting Mother with Two Children III; this was confirmed by the Advisory Board in 2010 following a review after the amendment of the law. With regard to Houses by the Sea in the Leopold Museum, following lengthy negotiations in 2011 and 2012, an agreement was reached on financial compensation for the legal successors of Jenny Steiner, as well as the addition of a supplementary text explaining the history of the painting. The proceeds from the sale of the Klimt work Watersnakes in 2013 were divided between Georg Ucicky’s widow, Ursula, and the legal successors of Klara Mertens, who was confirmed as the sole owner following arbitration proceedings, as the painting had been gifted to her by her mother as early as 1923. To this day, numerous works from Jenny Steiner’s collection have disappeared, including the portrait Trude Steiner, painted posthumously by Gustav Klimt in 1901. On 1 December 2009, the Vienna City Council decided to rename a public space in Vienna’s Neubau district, in the immediate vicinity of the former company headquarters on Jenny-Steiner-Weg.