(ANSA-AFP) – ROME, APRIL 24 – A painting by Gustav Klimt, which was thought lost and was found after almost a century, was sold today at auction in Vienna for 30 million euros, thus setting a record for an Austrian auction. The portrait of Fraulein Lieser once belonged to a Jewish family in Austria and was last seen in public in 1925 at an exhibition held in 1926 by Otto Kallir-Nirenstein in the Neue Galerie in Vienna. Her fate is unclear, but the family of the current owners has owned the painting since the 1960s. The Viennese auction house im Kinsky had estimated the value of 30-50 million euros for the Portrait of Miss Lieser, this is the title of the painting.
Portraits of great Austrians are rarely placed on the market. Last June, Klimt’s “Dame mit Faecher” (Lady with a Fan) sold in London for 74 million pounds ($94.3 million at the time), a European art auction record. The highest price paid at auction in Austria so far was a work by the Flemish painter Frans Francken II, which sold for seven million euros in 2010.
“No one expected that a painting of this importance, missing for 100 years, would resurface,” Kinsky expert Claudia Moerth-Gasser said before the auction. “A painting of such rarity, of such artistic scope and value has not been available on the art market in Central Europe for decades,” im Kinsky said in a note when simultaneously announcing the auction and the reappearance of the work Oltre sketches by Klimt and works by his contemporaries such as Egon Schiele were also beaten for the “Portrait of Miss Lieser”. Before the auction, the well-preserved painting was exhibited in Vienna, Switzerland, Germany, Great Britain and Hong Kong. The painting, unsigned, shows a young woman adorned with a large cloak richly decorated with flowers on a bright red background. Mystery surrounds the identity of the model, who visited Klimt’s studio nine times for his portrait. She is known to be from the Lieser family, a Jewish industrial dynasty. She may be one of two daughters, named Helene and Annie, of Henriette (Lilly) Lieser, a patron. But the first catalog dedicated to Klimt, dating back to the 1960s, said that it was Lieser’s niece, Margarethe. Lilly Lieser remained in Vienna despite the seizure of power by the Nazis, she was deported in 1942 and killed in the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1943. (ANSA-AFP).
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