Why ‘Lost’ Klimt Portrait Will Draw More Than $30 Million Estimate At Vienna Auction Today

Today's Vienna sale of Gustav Klimt's sumptuous, rather haunting and thought-to-be-missed 'Bildnis Fräulein Lieser' or 'Portrait of Miss Lieser' at the Auktionshaus im Kinsky in the glorious Kinsky Palais (house estimate 30-50 million dollars) gives us not only a good opportunity to assess the current stratospheric price of the artist. The sale is also a good opportunity to look back on the life and achievements of one of the founding bad boys of the 20th century.

Commissioned from Klimt by members of one of Vienna's leading merchant families, the Liesers, two of whose patriarchs had made their fortunes in hemp rope and other products, from one of their daughters, the family had the painting returned , unfinished and unsigned, by Klimt. famous study after his untimely death from a stroke and influenza at the age of 62 in 1918. It remained in the possession of the Liesers and was almost included in a posthumous exhibition of the artist's work in the 1920s, but finally it didn't show. Since its creation by the artist, it had never been seen in public before its owner brought it to the im Kinsky auction house last January.

And, as with all works of art belonging to an upper-class Jewish family in Europe in the late 1930s, “Bildnis Fräulein Lieser” is associated with the infamous interregnum between 1939 and 1945, when the Nazis looted its millions of victims. It is not clear what happened to this painting after Hitler's Anschluss in 1939, or how the work survived the war and postwar period, but researchers have determined that it does not appear to have been confiscated by the Nazis, unlike many of Klimt's works. which were commissioned by Jewish members of Vienna's elites.

It is only true that the painting made its way from the Liesers to another Viennese family, in whose living room it hung, rather without reviews, but with extraordinary tranquility given the fame of its creator , since 1960, while art historians and Nazi hunters scratched hard. publicly to prove it for decades.

An heiress of this family is today's sender. Here's why this particular Klimt will be subject to a particularly sharp market at its auction this afternoon: The Austrian government has granted the sellers full right to sell the painting to a buyer outside the country, increasing thus its value and, presumably, the price it will bring.

To the same progenitor: In his time at the dawn of the 20th century, very few leading cultural makers in Central Europe of the time swept through as many social and artistic barricades as Klimt. He was the fundamental bohemian expressionist of Vienna. His work was known and loved both at home and throughout Europe, except in the United States. Indeed, back home in Austria, Klimt's reputation as a founding member of the Vienna Secession movement almost rivals his personal history as a wild super-rake.

Once the 20th century began and Klimt had fully established his rock-solid reputation in Austria, he lived primarily at Lake Atter, working in his workshop and joking lakeside with his huge group of models/muses /lovers Klimt lived in a permanent state of Manet Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, minus the clothes of the men in that painting: heavily influenced in his later career by the Byzantine Empire, the painter dressed like a Beatle in his years of Indian escapism, or like one of the first pajamas of the era Hugh Hefner, name, in giant. hand-embroidered floor-length caftans, with, of course, zero underneath. As pajamas did for Hef, caftans presumably allowed Klimt less to break free from the strictures of the late Habsburg dress code of his era, if the impulse got to him and a of their models.

Never married, estimates vary on the number of children Klimt ultimately left behind when he died of a stroke and pneumonia at age 62 at the end of World War I in 1918. The number of children, a question of historical debate, now rivals that of Mick Jagger. , the Klimt matter was adjudicated between the ages of six and fourteen, the latter number derived from the reputed number of paternity/inheritance claims upon the painter's untimely death. More specifically, courtly Vienna laessig — which is loosely translated as leave or permissive: on the products of such athletic joy, Klimt's many heirs and assigns remain a lively topic of conversation in Viennese solid coffee society. After all, in Vienna, 1918 and the collapse of the Habsburgs was, well, just yesterday, the Napoleonic occupation was a little further back.

Another way to put it would be to say that Klimt simultaneously attacked the artistic and social canon of the fin-de-siècle and opened a rather broad path towards European modernity. Some of the half-dozen (or so) “recognized” children out of wedlock were, naturally, the product of his relationships with his infamously beautiful haute-bourgeois role models. It will be a huge irony that the woman in his life to whom we might attach the classification of primary “partner” or who served as his enduring and lifelong muse, Emilie Floege, never bore him children.

Despite all this ruddy social game, which was more than known how Klimt lived, the upper bourgeoisie of Vienna fully embraced him, sending him their daughters and wives to commission (very expensive) portraits, hence the star lot Today's home, Fräulein's portrait. Lieser. Receipts for payments for the picture are in the Klimt archive. Which Fräulein Lieser sat in the family for Klimt remains a question, but excellent research as the painting was unearthed, to great surprise and acclaim in Vienna, by Austrian journalist and art expert Olga Kronsteiner guides the possibilities towards one of the daughters of the dynasty – co-founder Julius Lieser and his wife Henriette, art patrons.

Conclusion: This painting, believed to have been erased from the canon, is with us, and is an extraordinary late example of that artist's previous record-breaking work “Dame mit Faecher” (or “Lady With A fan”). , brought $108.4 million, a record for the artist and the highest price ever publicly paid for a painting in Europe, as predicted by this writer in this space. As today's star lot has cleared for international buyers looking to get work out of Austria, look for Fräulein Lieser's luminous long-necked beauty to fetch a price, if not well beyond, her estimate superior in a few hours.