The Pisko Gallery was an art salon, dealership, auction house and publishing company run by Gustav Pisko from 1896 and by Clementine Pisko from 1911. Together with the Miethke Gallery it was one of the most important centers of art trading in Vienna around 1900.

The art dealer Gustav Pisko was born in Malacky, which then belonged to Hungary (now Slovakia), on 21 October 1866. He was the secretary of the Salzburg Art Association and worked at the Crystal Palace in Munich. He began advertising his “painting salon” at Schwindgasse 11 in Vienna in newspaper ads in 1896. According to Vienna’s official gazette, the company G. Pisko with Gustav Pisko as its owner was registered as a sole proprietorship “for the purpose of picture trading” at the prestigious address Parkring 2 in Vienna’s First District on 10 September 1898.

The program of the art salon and the auction house changed monthly. In 1899, for instance, Tina Blau-Lang held her first collective exhibition at the Pisko Gallery. The women artists’ association Acht Künstlerinnen – whose members included Marie Egner – as well as Olga Wisinger-Florian also exhibited repeatedly at the art salon. Daily newspapers reported that the Emperor visited the gallery on several occasions, for instance on 21 December 1901, when Gustav Pisko and the painter Ludwig Hans Fischer gave the Emperor a guided tour of the gallery. In 1907, the Pisko Gallery moved to a new address nearby: Lothringerstraße 14, at the Schwarzenbergplatz. The same year, the auction “Gemälde und Plastiken von Mitgliedern des Hagenbundes” [“Paintings and Sculptures by Members of the Hagenbund”] was held and Gustav Pisko collaborated with the art writer Arthur Roessler to publish a monograph on Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller in the shape of a luxurious two-volume book with a limited edition of 500 copies.

When the Neukunstgruppe exhibited at the Pisko Gallery in 1909, young Egon Schiele met Arthur Roessler.

Gustav Pisko married his niece Clementine (née Töpfer), the daughter of his sister Mathilde (née Pisko) and Gustav Töpfer, in 1903. After his death on 3 March 1911, his widow Clementine Pisko managed the company. The gallery subsequently held exhibitions of the Austrian Artists’ League (1912/1913), a solo exhibition of Max Oppenheimer (1913), presentations of photographs by Pauline Hamilton and many auctions of the estates of renowned art collectors. In 1914, Clementine’s brother Rudolf Töpfer became a partner in the company. Even a contest combined with an exhibition was held at the Pisko Gallery: The best painting stood to win 3000 crowns. The panel included Gustav Klimt, Rudolf Junk, Josef Hoffmann and Karl Reininghaus.

In 1917, Rudolf Töpfer left the company and Gustav Pisko’s brother, the journalist and editor Dr. Alexander Pisko, became the gallery’s provisional curator. The art salon was deleted from the commercial register on 28 July 1925.