In January, our newspaper reported that a Gustav Klimt painting thought to have disappeared a hundred years ago had been found in Vienna. The painting Portrait of Fraulein Lieser was one of the last works of the world-famous artist. The painting was found in a private Austrian collection after almost 100 years, the picture was hanging on the wall of a family villa near Vienna.
There are many unanswered questions about the unfinished painting, Portrait of Fraulein Lieser, which Klimt painted in 1917 – a year before his death.
Photo: X
There are also debates about who the woman in the picture is and what happened to the painting during the Nazi era.
The value of the painting is estimated at 50 million euros (19.6 billion forints), although it can reach a higher price.
The image is believed to depict one of the daughters of Adolf or Justus Lieser, siblings from a wealthy Jewish industrial family. According to art historians Thomas Natter and Alfred Weidinger, the painting depicts Margarethe Constance Lieser, daughter of Adolf Lieser.
However, according to the Vienna auction house im Kinsky, which put the art object up for auction, the painting may depict one of the two daughters of Justus Lieser and his wife, Henriette. Henriette, known as Lilly, was a patron of modern art. He was deported by the Nazis and died in the Auschwitz concentration camp during the Holocaust. His daughters, Helene and Annie, survived World War II.
The auction house said in its statement that the fate of the painting after 1925 is unclear. All that is known is that it was acquired by the seller’s predecessor in law in the 1960s and passed to the current owner through three successive inheritances.
The identity of the current Austrian owners has not been disclosed.
The painting is being sold on behalf of the owners and heirs of Adolf and Henriette Lieser under the Washington Principles – an international agreement designed to return art looted by the Nazis to the descendants of the people from whom the pieces were taken. Earlier, we also wrote about the fact that many German government offices may contain artefacts from Nazi looting. Of the works of art in the possession of the German federal government, 2,500 are suspected of having been looted by the Nazis.
Erika Jakubovits, the executive director of the presidency of the Austrian Jewish Community, said that there are still many unanswered questions, so she asked that the case be investigated by an independent party, the BBC wrote.
The return of art treasures is a very sensitive issue, all research must be done accurately and in detail, and the provenance of the painting must be transparent
– said Yakubovits.
Klimt’s works have fetched huge sums at auction in the past
The artist’s last painting sold for 85.3 million pounds (371 billion forints), making it the most valuable work of art ever sold at auction in Europe.
In 2017, Oprah Winfrey sold a portrait of Gustav Klimt for 150 million dollars, roughly HUF 43.4 billion. The image was reportedly purchased by an unnamed Chinese buyer.
A painting by Gustav Klimt that had been stolen 23 years ago was found by a gardener at a gallery in Piancenza, Italy, in December 2020. The gardener found the painting Bildnis einer Frau (‘Portrait of a Lady’) in the courtyard of the Ricci-Oddi Modern Art Gallery while he was cutting the ivy near the building’s wall. The painting was stolen from the institution in 1997.
Tags: painting Gustav Klimt believed lost years auctioned Vienna
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