Klimt’s “Portrait of Fräulein Lieser”, which was considered lost, will be put up for auction

The Viennese auction house Auktionshaus im Kinsky has released sensational news: the “Portrait of Fräulein Lieser” (1917–1918), one of the last works of Gustav Klimt, has been discovered. Nothing has been known about the whereabouts of the portrait since 1925, and given the tragic circumstances of the biographies of its customers, industrialists of Jewish origin, the painting was usually listed as missing. The brilliant auction prospects of the newly found portrait are quite obvious – although in its past fate not everything is as obvious as we would like.

When Klimt died in February 1918 from the effects of a stroke complicated by the Spanish flu, “Portrait of Fräulein Lieser” was still not completely finished and was in the artist’s studio. The painting was given to the family of the customer, the prominent industrialist Adolf Lieser: the portrait depicts either his daughter Margarita-Constance, or his niece Henrietta-Amalia. In 1925, the portrait was exhibited at an exhibition as belonging to the Lieser family, on the same occasion the painting was photographed, and the black and white photograph preserved in the Austrian National Library to this day remained the only evidence with which researchers of Klimt’s work could operate. What happened next is unknown: all other traces of “Portrait of Fraulein Lieser” disappear for a long time. Perhaps this is due to the tragic fate of the family, whose members (including Henrietta Amalie, who died in Auschwitz in 1943) were exterminated by the Nazis.

Beloved by the masses, the early, “Byzantine” Klimt is not suddenly recognizable in the portrait: no gold, behind the shoulders of the black-haired girl there is a barely painted background in red tones, rather alarmingly combined with the greenish dress of the model and the blue shawl thrown over her shoulders. The edges of the shawl, however, are densely decorated with flowers, and here Klimt of a happier time would probably once again embark on spicy symbolist ornamentation – but in this case, the storm of floral motifs looks quite expressionist.

The name of the current owner of the painting (an Austrian, apparently) is not named; the auction house reports that the newly found Klimt has belonged to his family since the 1960s, but that only in 2022 the owner realized what exactly he owned. God knows what happened before 1960: the auctioneers do not provide any versions or evidence here, honestly admitting that they are in the dark. The difficulty here is this: given the death of the Lisers, one can suspect that the Nazis confiscated the painting from them at one time. The current Austrian laws in such cases strongly and unconditionally require the return of confiscated property to the heirs. There were plenty of incidents, but it’s hard not to recall the most famous precedent of restitution, associated specifically with Klimt’s work: in 2005, the heiress of the Bloch-Bauer family sued the Vienna Belvedere for one of his most recognizable masterpieces, the so-called “Golden Adele” – a portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer (1907), expropriated after the Anschluss by the new masters of Austria.

Auktionshaus im Kinsky swears that it has not found any evidence of unjust confiscation or resale of the “Portrait of Fräulein Lieser” – in particular, on the back of the painting there are no seals of either the Gestapo or any of the art dealers involved at that time in the circulation of confiscated art values . But at the same time he reports that, just in case, he found the rightful heirs of the Lizer family and entered into some kind of deal with them, in order, obviously, to exclude possible lawsuits in the event of the sale of the painting.

Not the most perfect and not the most polished Klimt thing with not the most clear fate nevertheless promises a wonderful future: after all, a lost and rediscovered portrait, and one of the artist’s last works – the market loves this. After all, just recently, in June last year, another one of Klimt’s latest paintings, “Lady with a Fan,” was auctioned at Sotheby’s for an impressive $108 million. Auktionshaus im Kinsky is going to put the portrait up for auction on April 24, having previously rolled it out for better results. he is on a large pre-auction tour (Switzerland, Germany, Great Britain, Hong Kong).

Vasily Lepskikh