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

Today’s sale in Vienna of the Gustav Klimt’s sumptuous, quite haunting and thought-t0-be-lost “Bildnis Fräulein Lieser” or “Portrait of Miss Lieser” at Auktionshaus im Kinsky in the glorious Kinsky Palais (house estimate $30 million to $50 million) affords us not just a fine opportunity to assess the artist’s ongoing stratospheric price point. The sale is also a fine chance to wander back through the life and accomplishments of one of the 20th century’s founding bad boys.

Commissioned from Klimt by members of one of Vienna’s leading merchant families, the Liesers, two patriarchs of which had made a fortune in hemp rope and other products, of one of their daughters, the family had the painting returned, unfinished and unsigned, from Klimt’s famous studio upon his untimely death by stroke and influenza at 62 in 1918. It remained in the Liesers’ possession, and was nearly included in one posthumous exhibition of the artist’s work in the 1920s but was ultimately not put on show. Since its creation by the artist it had never been seen in public before its owner brought it in to the auction house im Kinsky this past January.

And, as with every art work belonging to an upper-class Jewish family across Europe in the late 1930s, there is associated with “Bildnis Fräulein Lieser” the infamous interregnum between 1939-1945, as the Nazis looted their millions of victims. Unclear is what happened to this painting after Hitler’s Anschluss in 1939, or how the work survived the war and the post-war period, but researchers have determined that it does not seem to have been confiscated by the Nazis, unlike so many of Klimt’s works that were commissioned by Jewish members of Vienna’s elites.

Certain is only that the painting made its way from the Liesers to another Viennese family, in whose living room it hung, rather unremarked but in extraordinary quietness given the fame of its creator, since 1960, while art historians and Nazi hunters alike scratched around quite publicly for evidence of it for decades.

An heiress to that family is today’s consignor. This is the reason that this particular Klimt will undergo a particularly pointed market testat its auction this afternoon: The government of Austria has given the sellers the full right to sell the painting to a buyer outside the country, thus amplifying its value and, presumably, the price it will bring.

To the progenitor himself: In his moment at the dawn of the 20th century, very few leading culture makers in Central Europe of the day raged through quite as many social and artistic barricades as Klimt. He was Vienna’s seminal bohemian expressionist. His work was well-known and beloved both at home and across Europe, less so in the States. In fact, at home in Austria, Klimt’s reputation as a founding member of the Vienna Secession movement just about rivals his personal history as a super-rake wildman.

Once the 20th century dawned and Klimt had fully attained his rock-solid reputation in Austria, he lived mainly on Lake Atter, working in his atelier and goofing about by the lake with his outsized coterie of models/muses/mistresses. Klimt lived in a permanent state of Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, minus the clothes on the men in that painting: Heavily influenced in his late career by the Byzantine Empire, the painter dressed like a Beatle in their Indian-escapade years, or like an early-day pajama-era Hugh Hefner, namley, in giant hand-embroidered floor-length caftans, with, of course, zero underneath. As the pajamas did for Hef, presumably the caftans afforded Klimt less undoing from the strictures his era’s late-Habsburg dress code, should the urge overtake him and one of his models.

Never married, estimates vary on the number of children Klimt ultimately left behind at his death from a stroke and pneumonia at 62 at the end of WWI, in 1918. The number of children, a matter of historical debate, rival those of Mick Jagger now, Klimt’s issue being adjudicated at between six and fourteen, the latter number derived from the reputed number of paternity/inheritance suits at the painter’s untimely death. More to the point, courtly Vienna being laessig — which loosely translates as laissez or permissive — about products of such athletic dalliance, Klimt’s many heirs and assigns remain a lively talking point in Vienna’s rock-solid cafe society. After all, in Vienna, 1918 and the collapse of the Habsburgs was, well, just yesterday, the Napoleonic occupation being just a wee bit further back.

Another way to put this would be to say that Klimt made simultaneous assaults on the artistic and social canon of the fin-de-siecle and blazed quite a broad trail toward European modernity. A number of the half-dozen (or so) ‘acknowledged’ out-of-wedlock children were, naturally, a product of his relationships with his infamously beautiful haute bourgeoise models. It will remain an enormous irony that the woman in his life to whom we might attach the classification of primary “partner,” or who served as an enduring, lifelong muse, Emilie Floege, never bore him children.

Despite all this rouge-ish social play, which was more than well known as Klimt lived, Vienna’s haute bourgeoise embraced him fully, sending their daughters and wives to him for (very expensive) commissioned portraits, hence today’s stellar lot, the portrait of Fräulein Lieser. The receipts for the payments for the picture are in the Klimt archive. Which Fräulein Lieser in the family sat for Klimt remains a question, but excellent research as the painting was unearthed, to great shock and acclaim in Vienna, by Austrian journalist and art expert Olga Kronsteiner tips the possibilities e toward one of the daughters of dynasty-co-founder Julius Lieser and his art-patron wife Henriette.

Bottom line: This painting, thought to be erased from the canon, is with us, and it is an extraordinary late-period example of that artist whose 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. Because today’s star lot has been cleared for international buyers looking to remove the work from Austria, look for Fräulein Lieser’s luminous long-necked beauty to bring a price toward, if not far beyond, its upper estimate in a few hours.