On Wednesday, an public sale home in Europe will put a portray by Gustav Klimt up on the market, with a preauction estimate of at the very least 30 million euros (about $32 million).
Whoever buys it can get hold of a portray by an artist whose main works not often come up on the market, but in addition a portrait whose topic, provenance and present possession are both unknown, not public or the topic of debate.
The auctioneer promoting the portray just isn’t a world heavyweight like Sotheby’s or Christie’s, however im Kinsky, a neighborhood home in Vienna whose largest sale till now was in 2010: $6.1 million, for a portray by Egon Schiele.
At a information convention in January asserting the sale of the mysterious Klimt work, Ernst Ploil, the co-chief govt of im Kinsky, mentioned: “All is at the hours of darkness. Every time there’s an argument for one thing, counterarguments come up time and again.”
A few of the debate facilities on the id of the younger girl portrayed. Different questions have arisen about what occurred to the paintings in the course of the Anschluss, when Austria was annexed into the Third Reich.
The portray was owned by a Jewish household throughout that interval, and there aren’t any paperwork that document what occurred to it throughout these years when Austria’s Jewish inhabitants was persecuted, deported and murdered and their possessions plundered by the Nazis.
The questions surrounding the portrait have solely added to the curiosity within the sale of this work by Klimt, one of many founders of the influential Vienna Secessionist motion, whose extremely ornamental work are actually among the many artwork market’s most coveted trophies. Final June at Sotheby’s in London, his “Girl With a Fan” fetched $108.4 million.
The story of this portray, often known as “Portrait of Fräulein Lieser,” begins in Vienna in 1917, when a teenage daughter of a rich Jewish household made the primary of 9 visits to Klimt’s studio to pose.
Klimt’s pocket book presents a clue, however an unsatisfying one, to the id of the topic. It information every go to by a “Lis,” signifying a member of the prosperous Lieser household. However Justus and Adolf Lieser, two German-born brothers who based Austria’s first mechanical hemp rope and wire manufacturing facility, every had teenage daughters.
The portrait was by no means completed. Artwork historians consider the unsigned canvas was in Klimt’s studio when the artist died in 1918, in the course of the influenza pandemic. For many years the portray has solely been recognized from one black-and-white {photograph} that was taken within the Twenties. Afterward, the portrait’s whereabouts was largely unknown.
The public sale home means that “Fräulein Lieser” would possibly probably depict one of many two teenage daughters of Henriette Lieser, who was often known as Lilly: both Helene, who grew to become a distinguished economist, or Annie, a celebrated dancer. A member of the Landau household, one in all fin-de-siècle Vienna’s very wealthiest, Lilly divorced Justus Lieser in 1905 and have become a patron of the Viennese avant-garde.
Im Kinsky’s suggestion relies on a list card on the destructive of that outdated black-and-white picture of the portray within the Austrian Nationwide Library. The cardboard signifies that in 1925, the portrait was hanging in Lilly’s palatial dwelling in Argentinierstrasse.
Lilly was deported by the Nazis in 1942 and murdered at Auschwitz in 1943, in keeping with the catalog.
However her daughters survived the Holocaust. Neither is thought to have tried to seek out or declare the Klimt after World Warfare II. And the portray doesn’t seem in Lilly Lieser’s declaration of invaluable belongings that each one Jews in Germany and Austria had to attract up for the Nazis in 1938.
Nevertheless, current analysis, and articles within the Austrian newspaper Der Customary, assist the view that the portrait is one in all Lilly’s daughters. The articles describe letters from 1961 that have been lately found within the archive of Mumok, Vienna’s museum of contemporary artwork, that point out the portray at the moment was within the possession of a person named Adolf Hagenauer.
In a single letter, Hagenauer is upbraided by a curator and future director of the museum, Werner Hofmann, who accuses him of buying the portrait from a Jew who had “died within the gasoline chambers,” as Lilly had.
Through the Anschluss, Hagenauer, the managing director of a household grocery enterprise, was married to the daughter of Lilly Lieser’s butler, in keeping with analysis by Georg Gaugusch, creator of a 5,000-page historical past concerning the Jewish upper-middle class in Vienna.
Gaugusch and Olga Kronsteiner, who wrote the Der Customary articles, have raised the likelihood that Lilly traded the portray to Hagenauer for provisions because the persecution of Jews heightened in 1938, the yr by which Hagenauer is documented as making use of for membership of the Nazi celebration.
Hagenauer finally gave the Klimt to his daughter, in keeping with Der Customary. The newspaper reported that the daughter died final yr, having bequeathed the portray to a distant relative, who’s the undisclosed vendor at this time. Ploil mentioned in an e-mail that Der Customary was appropriate on this element.
However two Klimt consultants, Tobias Natter and Alfred Weidinger, say the portray truly depicts a distinct teenage lady: Margarethe Constance Lieser, the daughter of Justus’s brother Adolf and his spouse, Silvia. Adolf died in 1919. Margarethe married the Hungarian Catholic convert Henry de Gelsey in 1921 and moved to Budapest, adopted by her mom in 1938.
Weidinger mentioned in an e-mail that in 2007 he had been launched to Margarethe’s son William de Gelsey, an funding banker. He mentioned de Gelsey, who died in London in 2021, with no kids, had requested his assist in monitoring the portray.
He was satisfied that Klimt had painted his mom, Weidinger mentioned: “He mentioned there was by no means any doubt about it, as a result of his household at all times talked concerning the portrait of his mom.”
De Gelsey made a provision in his will for a donation to a Catholic charity if the portray have been rediscovered and offered, however by no means registered the Klimt portrait as lacking on the database of Artwork Loss Register, which locates and recovers stolen artworks.
Weidinger and Natter mentioned they weren’t approached by the public sale home for his or her opinions on the portray. Natter mentioned in an e-mail that “opposite to all worldwide requirements, the public sale home has didn’t contain the 2 main Klimt consultants, each of whom have revealed a catalog raisonné.”
Im Kinsky mentioned in an e-mail that it had not approached Natter as a result of his views of the portray have been recognized from his catalog, but it surely had consulted at the very least three unbiased artwork historians.
Im Kinsky’s public sale catalog says that, as a part of the hassle to promote the portray, its present house owners had acknowledged the “many ambiguities and historic gaps” in its provenance and reached “a good and simply resolution” with authorized successors of the Lieser household. This settlement meant that, from a “purely authorized standpoint,” it was “immaterial” who commissioned the portray and which of the three Lieser daughters was depicted.
Ploil mentioned that no matter which Lieser daughter is portrayed, the portray had been unlawfully acquired in the course of the Nazi interval. “Each type of taking away in the course of the Nazi time needs to be handled as illegal,” he mentioned.
When requested if de Gelsey’s nominated charity could be a beneficiary of the public sale, Ploil, who can be a accomplice within the Vienna legislation agency Ploil Boesch, mentioned in an e-mail that although a confidentiality clause prevented him from commenting on that particular level, “all authorized successors of Adolf, Justus and Henriette Lieser are a part of the settlement.”
Jil Birnbaum, a solicitor on the London legislation agency Wedlake Bell, which handles the de Gelsey property, mentioned that the heirs of William and his brother Alexander, who died in 2006, are included within the settlement.
Beneath Austrian legislation, authorized agreements between house owners and successors can, in sure circumstances, settle a restitution concern as a substitute of the formal return of a looted paintings. The work then needs to be granted an export license by the state. The Austrian Federal Monuments Authority issued such a license to the Klimt on Oct. 23, 2023.
“Restitution is a really delicate concern, and we’ve got to analysis so much and be very correct concerning the data,” mentioned Erika Jakubovits, govt director of the presidency of Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien, the Jewish Group of Vienna.
“Solely the rightful heirs needs to be those to settle with,” Jakubovits mentioned. “A authorized opinion on the heirs needs to be ready earlier than beginning settlement procedures,” she added, alluding to what she views as remaining questions on who’re the authorized heirs to “Portrait of Fräulein Lieser.”
Although the most recent analysis reported in Der Customary takes the view that the Lieser lady is more likely to be Helene, the longer term economist, Ploil mentioned in an e-mail that it was necessary to not go too far in particularly figuring out the topic of the portrait at this junction.
He famous that legal professionals for the de Gelsey household “nonetheless keep on with their opposite opinion that Adolf Lieser has commissioned the portray — exhibiting Margarethe Lieser and never Helene.”
Due to the inconclusiveness, Ploil mentioned, “the catalog won’t be modified or amended.”
Natter, the Klimt scholar, mentioned the id of the lady had wider penalties. “The id is necessary because it permits us to return to the commissioner and tells us so much concerning the provenance and possession historical past,” he mentioned. “It actually does make a distinction.”
