The last known location of “Portrait of Fräulein Lieser” by world-renowned Austrian artist Gustav Klimt was in Vienna in the mid-1920s. The vivid painting featuring a young woman was listed as property of a “Mrs Lieser” — believed to be Henriette Lieser, who was deported and killed by the Nazis.
The only remaining record of the work was a black and white photograph from 1925, around the time it was last exhibited, which was kept in the archives of the Austrian National Library.
Now, almost 100 years later, this painting by one of the world’s most famous modernist artists is on display and up for sale — having been rediscovered in what the auction house has hailed as a sensational find.
“The rediscovery of this portrait, one of the most beautiful of Klimt’s last creative period, is a sensation,” Austrian auction house im Kinsky said in a statement.
“A painting of such rarity, artistic significance, and value has not been available on the art market in Central Europe for decades,” it added. The painting will be presented internationally, including in Switzerland, Germany, Britain, and Hong Kong, before going to auction on April 24.
The 31-by-55-inch portrait could fetch between 30 million and 50 million euros ($32.5 million and $54.4 million) at auction.
Other works by Klimt, who is perhaps best known for his painting “The Kiss,” have sold for millions of dollars.
The Lieser family “belonged to the circle of wealthy, upper-class Viennese society in which Klimt found his patrons and clients,” according to the auction house.
It is unclear which member of the Lieser family is depicted in the piece: According to catalogues of Klimt’s work, Adolf Lieser — one of two brothers who were “among the leading industrialists of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy” — commissioned a painting of his 18-year-old daughter Margarethe Constance.
But some accounts suggest that Henriette Amalie Lieser-Landau, who was married to Adolf’s brother, Justus, until 1905, may have commissioned Klimt to paint one of her own daughters, im Kinsky said.
The subject — whoever she was — visited the artist’s studio nine times in April and May 1917, the auction house said. Small parts of the painting remained unfinished by the time of Klimt’s death in early 1918, when the piece was given to the Lieser family.
“The intense colors of the painting and the shift toward loose, open brushstrokes show Klimt at the height of his late period,” im Kinsky said.
Ernst Ploil, a managing director at im Kinsky, said in an email Friday that the painting was rediscovered in 2022, when the owner approached the auction house. The work had been purchased by a relative in the 1960s and passed through the family until it came into the possession of the current owner, he added.
Ploil said the firm had “checked [the] history and provenance of the painting in all possible ways in Austria” and “found no evidence that the painting has ever been exported out of Austria, confiscated or looted” during the Nazi era.
Equally, however, he said the auction house had no proof that the painting was not stolen — and so had reached an agreement with the present owner and the descendants of the Lieser family. He added that the deal is based on the Washington Principles, a set of guidelines for identifying and restoring artwork confiscated by the Nazis to their rightful owners.
Another Klimt work, “Dame mit Fächer” (“Lady With a Fan”), sold for $108 million in London last year — setting the highest price for any artwork ever auctioned in Europe, the Associated Press reported at the time. In 2006, his painting “Adele Bloch-Bauer I” — once at the center of a high-profile Nazi art theft case — sold for $135 million, a record sum at the time.
In 2017, a long-lost Leonardo da Vinci painting, “Salvator Mundi” (“Savior of the World”), sold for $450 million — in what auction house Christie’s described as “the most expensive painting ever sold at auction.”
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