‘Lost’ Gustav Klimt painting sells for €30m
A long-lost painting by the Austrian artist Gustav Klimt, thought to have vanished for the past century, has been successfully auctioned in Vienna.
Entitled “Portrait of Fraulein Lieser,” the unfinished piece fetched €30m (£26m; $32m) at the auction.
Commissioned in 1917 by a prominent Jewish industrialist family, just a year before Klimt’s passing, the painting holds a historical allure.
However, lingering mysteries surround the artwork, including debates regarding the identity of the woman portrayed and its whereabouts during the Nazi regime.
It’s widely speculated that the subject of the portrait could be one of the daughters of either Adolf or Justus Lieser, brothers belonging to a prosperous Jewish industrialist lineage.
While art historians Thomas Natter and Alfred Weidinger assert that the painting depicts Margarethe Constance Lieser, daughter of Adolf Lieser, the im Kinsky auction house in Vienna, responsible for the auction, suggests an alternative possibility.
They propose that the artwork might represent one of Justus Lieser and his wife Henriette’s two daughters.
Henriette, who was known as Lilly, was a patron of modern art. She was deported by the Nazis and died in the Auschwitz concentration camp during the Holocaust.
Her daughters, Helene and Annie, both survived the Second World War.
The auction house said in a statement that the exact fate of the painting after 1925 was “unclear”.
“What is know is that it was acquired by a legal predecessor of the consignor in the 1960s and went to the current owner through three successive inheritances.”
The identity of the current Austrian owners has not been made public.
The painting was sold on behalf of these owners and the legal successors of Adolf and Henriette Lieser, based on the Washington Principles – an international agreement to return Nazi-looted art to the descendants of the people the pieces were taken from.
Ernst Ploil from im Kinsky told the BBC: “We have an an agreement, according to the Washington principles, with the whole family”.
The im Kinsky catalogue described this agreement as “a fair and just solution”.
However Erika Jakubovits, the executive director of the Presidency of the Austrian Jewish Community, said there were still “many unanswered questions”.
She has called for the case to be researched by “an independent party”.
“Art restitution is a very sensitive issue, all research must be carried out accurately and in detail, and the result must be comprehensible and transparent,” Ms Jakubovits said.
“It must be ensured that there is also a state-of-the-art procedure for future private restitutions.”
Klimt’s art has fetched huge sums at auction in the past.
His Lady with a Fan piece sold for £85.3m at Sotheby’s in June 2023, making it the most valuable work of art ever sold at auction in Europe.
