The Klimt auction

“Only” 30 million for Klimt’s “Miss Lieser”

Gustav Klimt's Miss Lieser went under the hammer on Wednesday evening

(Bild: APA/Roland Schlager)

Klimt's never-completed "Portrait of Miss Lieser", which had been lost for decades, has now gone under the hammer at the Viennese auction house "im Kinsky". Instead of a record-breaking chase by bidders, the painting only just reached the lower estimate of 30 million euros - and then the hammer fell. Bidders had hoped for 50 million or more, up to 70 million.

Is the art thriller surrounding Gustav Klimt's Miss Lieser, which has prompted repeated criticism and protests from scholars, restitution experts and newspaper commentators in Europe and New York in recent weeks, now over? Perhaps not. Klimt's unfinished "Portrait of Miss Lieser", which had been lost for decades, went under the hammer yesterday at the Kinsky auction house in Vienna. But after just a short time and at "only" 30 million, auctioneer and Kinsky managing director Michael Kovacek had to give up - to a bidder in the room. The big, exciting race for the late Klimt did not take place. The upper estimate of 50 million or even more, as had been speculated, remained a long way off.

Surprise: new heir suddenly appears
The greatest excitement was caused by the appearance of a new heir shortly before the auction. A relative of the Lieser family, who was not contacted by the auction house, became aware of the painting through the recently published article in the "Süddeutsche Zeitung". The engineer from Munich is now considering legal action. But where will the work of art find its place in the future? Will it disappear into a bank vault as an investment and thus be lost to art and Klimt research?

Many questions remain unanswered: It is still not known who this "Fräulein Lieser" is: Margarethe Constance, the mother of the Jewish baron William de Gelsey, a native of Vienna, who always suspected that the painting was being kept from him and said that it would "only reappear after his death". What happened! Or is it one of the sisters Helene and Annie Lieser, whose mother Henriette "Lilly" was murdered in the Holocaust? Scholars are fiercely critical of the fact that the Monuments Office released the painting for export as "restitution property" as early as 2023, even though the Nazis never confiscated the work.

The question of provenance is partly unresolved. And is it not strange why the current owner did not approach one of the big houses such as Sotheby's or Christie's with the sale, where Klimt fetched up to 100 million? Were there fears about the export?