A portrait of a young woman by Gustav Klimt that was long believed to be lost was sold at an auction in Vienna on Wednesday for $32 million. The Austrian modernist artist started work on the "Portrait of Fräulein Lieser" in 1917, the year before he died, and it is one of his last works. Bidding started at $30 million, and the sale price was at the lower end of an expected range of $32-54 million The buyer wasn't identified. The Im Kinsky auction house said that "a painting of such rarity, artistic significance, and value has not been available on the art market in Central Europe for decades."
The intensely colored painting was auctioned on behalf of the current owners, Austrian private citizens whose names weren't released, and the legal heirs of Adolf and Henriette Lieser, one of whom is believed to have commissioned the painting. It's not entirely clear which member of the Lieser family was the model. Klimt left the painting, with small parts unfinished, in his studio when he died of a stroke in early 1918 and it was given to the family who had commissioned it, according to the auction house. The Jewish family fled Austria after 1930 and lost most of their possessions.
It's unclear exactly what happened to the painting between 1925 and the 1960s, a period that includes the Nazi dictatorship. Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938. The auction house says there is no evidence that the painting was confiscated then, but also no proof that it wasn't. "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," the auction house said, per the Guardian. (Last year,a Klimt painting sold for more than $100 million, breaking a European record.)
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