klimt’s fräulein lieser

“The paint­ing was cat­a­loged as lost, like­ly de­stroyed dur­ing the war. Its reap­pear­ance on the mar­ket was com­plete­ly un­ex­pect­ed.”
—im Kin­sky

“Klimt prob­a­bly be­gan the paint­ing in May 1917. The painter chose a three-quar­ter por­trait for his de­pic­tion and shows the young woman in a strict­ly frontal pose, close to the fore­ground, against a red, un­de­fined back­ground. A cape rich­ly dec­o­rat­ed with flow­ers is draped around her shoul­ders.”
—Jo Law­son-Tan­cred
 

Af­ter hav­ing been pre­sumed lost for near­ly a cen­tu­ry, one of Gus­tav Klimt’s finest por­traits is head­ing to the auc­tion block in Vi­en­na.

Cre­at­ed in 1917, Klimt’s Por­trait of Fräulein Lieser dis­ap­peared from pub­lic view af­ter a 1925 ex­hi­bi­tion.

Now, the re­cent­ly re­dis­cov­ered paint­ing is ex­pect­ed to re­al­ize be­tween 30 mil­lion eu­ros ($32 mil­lion) and 50 mil­lion eu­ros ($54 mil­lion) when sold this April with Aus­tri­an auc­tion house im Kin­sky.

“A paint­ing of such rar­i­ty, artis­tic sig­nif­i­cance and val­ue has not been avail­able on the art mar­ket in Cen­tral Eu­rope for decades,” said im Kin­sky in a state­ment.

The por­trait de­picts a young mem­ber of the Liesers, a promi­nent up­per-class Vi­en­nese fam­i­ly that in­clud­ed in­dus­tri­al­ist broth­ers Adolf and Jus­tus Lieser.

While pre­vi­ous cat­a­logs of Klimt’s work de­scribe Adolf’s daugh­ter as the portrait’s sit­ter, new re­search sug­gests that the painting’s sub­ject could be one of the daugh­ters of Jus­tus and his wife Hen­ri­ette, a promi­nent arts pa­tron, ac­cord­ing to the auc­tion house.

Re­gard­less of her iden­ti­ty, the sit­ter in 1917 made nu­mer­ous vis­its to Klimt’s stu­dio in Vi­en­na. The sym­bol­ist painter died the fol­low­ing year from a stroke, leav­ing the un­signed work in his stu­dio.

Ac­cord­ing to the auc­tion house, faint pen­ciled shapes seen on the painting’s back­ground re­veal that the artist had po­ten­tial­ly planned to fur­ther elab­o­rate on the work.

Fol­low­ing Klimt’s death, the por­trait was giv­en to the fam­i­ly who com­mis­sioned it. Eight years lat­er, it was last seen in a pho­to­graph tak­en in con­nec­tion with a 1925 Klimt ex­hi­bi­tion or­ga­nized by Otto Kallir for Vienna’s Neue Ga­lerie.

How­ev­er, its prove­nance af­ter 1925 re­mains large­ly un­known.

The work was thought to have ini­tial­ly end­ed up in the hands of ei­ther Adolf or Hen­ri­ette, the lat­ter of whom was mur­dered af­ter be­ing de­port­ed to a con­cen­tra­tion camp in 1942.

There is no ev­i­dence that the work was loot­ed, stolen or oth­er­wise un­law­ful­ly seized be­fore or dur­ing the Sec­ond World War, ac­cord­ing to im Kin­sky, which not­ed that the por­trait hasn’t been sub­ject to any Nazi-loot­ed art claims.

“What is known 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”
—im Kin­sky

Klimt’s work has fetched stag­ger­ing sums at auc­tion in re­cent years. In June of 2023, his Lady with a Fan (1917–18) paint­ing re­al­ized $108.4 mil­lion at Sotheby’s in Lon­don, set­ting a new auc­tion record for Klimt and be­com­ing the most ex­pen­sive piece of art ever auc­tioned in Eu­rope.

The sale fol­lowed the $53 mil­lion Sotheby’s auc­tion of Klimt’s In­sel im At­tersee (cir­ca 1901-02) in May of that year.

And Klimt’s pre­vi­ous auc­tion record was es­tab­lished in 2022, when Birch For­est (1903) sold for $104.6 mil­lion at a Christie’s auc­tion of the art col­lec­tion of late Mi­crosoft co-founder Paul Allen.

 

—juli­ja svet­lo­va

Flom­mist Juli­ja Svet­lo­va is an art his­to­ri­an, free­lance re­searcher and a founder of Neja’s Art Walks, a be­spoke provider of art and his­to­ry-re­lat­ed tours and ex­pe­ri­ences in Lon­don. Juli­ja pre­vi­ous­ly worked as a col­lec­tion re­search as­sis­tant at the Tate. Copy­right © 2024 Juli­ja Svet­lo­va. Ad­di­tion­al im­ages: Source and source.

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