Aranka Munk
Aranka Munk was a Viennese art collector murdered in the Holocaust.
Early life and family
Born in Mako, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1862, into a Jewish family, Munk was the daughter of Simon Siegmund Pulitzer and Charlotte Pulitzer and the sister of Klimt's chief patron Serena Lederer and Jenny Steiner. She had three daughters, Lili Munk; Ria Munk and Lola Christine Sachsel-Kraus.Death of Ria Munk and Klimt portraits
In 1911, Munk's daughter Ria committed suicide. An art collector and patron of the arts, Munk asked Gustav Klimt to paint a death-bed portrait of her daughter. Klimt painted three versions, which each had different fates. The first portrait Klimt painted for Aranka Munk was "Ria Munk on Her Deathbed," which Munk found so upsetting that she gave it to a sculptor friend, whose heirs sold it after the war, passing through the collection of the singer Barbra Streisand.The second version was later reworked to show a dancer, and the third, which Munk kept, was the unfinished "Portrait of Ria Munk III", also known Frauenbildnis, which ended up in the Lentos Museum's collection. Klimt died before completing it. After Klimt's death Aranka Munk hung the unfinished portrait of her deceased daughter in her lake house.