The collection of the gallery owner and publisher Helmut Klewan, which has now been donated to Vienna's Leopold Museum, has what it takes to become a new, unique portrait archive of world literature.

With around 350 portraits, the exhibition catalog contains even more than is currently shown in the basement of the museum.

Sorted by country and national language, copper engravings, lithographs, woodcuts, drawings and photographs from four centuries can be seen.

Etchings by Georg Eisler and Horst Janssen are disproportionately represented, as are photographs by Isolde Ohlbaum, many of which are well known.

However, printed portraits such as Max Beckmann's by Edschmid, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's by Sternheim, Oskar Kokoschka's by Dehmel or Willi Geiger's by Heinrich Mann are not yet reproduced everywhere.

A pencil drawing by Ulysses Belz from 1996 shows Botho Strauß expressively doubled and looking in opposite directions.

In 1972, Günter Grass grabbed the grave needle himself to pose with snail.

A small-format etching of Döblin by Emil Orlik is particularly charming – one has rarely seen the Berlin doctor smile so mischievously.

Thomas Hardy stands out in English literature as the photographic bromine oil print by Hugh Thomas (1900);

photo engravings from America, for example by Walt Whitman or Ralph Waldo Emerson, also lead into the early history of photography.

The comparison of different techniques and artistic perspectives is illuminating, for example in three portraits of the philosopher Dostoyevsky: as a photograph by Constantin Chapiro from 1870, as a woodcut by Félix Vallotton from 1895 and as an etching by Beckmann from 1921. In addition to prints and photographs, there are also a number of original drawings.

A quick pen and ink sketch by Rudolf Grossmann of Jules Romains consists of very few sweeping lines.

Dominik Steiger, on the other hand, summarizes the literary prize winner Gerhard Rühm in a complex ink and pencil drawing: "In memory of the carnival 77".

Austrian literature is naturally well represented.

Michael Haussmann's engraving of Freud consists mainly of glasses and a tight-lipped chin, while Nestroy appears in a watercolor by Johann Christian Schoeller in Louis Angely's comedy "Seven Girls in Uniform" with a dagger and an eye patch.

The dense hanging of the small formats in a single large museum room resembles the overabundance in Klewan's own apartment.

The catalog is a treasure, especially since accompanying stories are told here.

For example, a portrait of Elias Canetti by Isolde Ohlbaum from 1984 gives details of Klewan's encounter with Canetti, who had returned to Zurich from London, in the Viennese Café Hawelka ten years earlier.

The writer then commented on Klewan's work as an art dealer with the following words: "But how can you do such a brutal job with such a sensitive face?"

The View from the Frame – Literary Portraits from the Klewan Collection.

In the Leopold Museum, Vienna;

until August 28th.

The catalog costs 19.90 euros.