Gustav Klimt’s “Portrait of Miss Lieser”, a painting of a young girl that was left unfinished when the Austrian artist died, was sold at auction this Wednesday for 30 million euros, despite questions still open about the character portrayed and about their previous owners.
The work was long believed to be lost, but it spent decades hanging in a private villa near Vienna, according to auction house Im Kinsky, which put it on display in January before the hammer went down. Im Kinsky had estimated its value at between 30 and 50 million euros.
The painting shows a likely teenage girl in a turquoise dress with a flowing floral robe against a red background, her alabaster skin and piercing light brown eyes contrasting with her dark, curly hair.
Despite portraying her so clearly, it remains uncertain who “Miss Lieser” really was. The brothers Adolf and Justus Lieser were wealthy industrialists in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and built their fortunes with jute and hemp, producing twine and rope.
Henriette Amalie Lieser-Landau, nicknamed “Lilly”, was married to Justus until their divorce in 1905 and became a well-known patron of the arts. It is possible that she commissioned a painting of one of her daughters or that Adolf Lieser requested a portrait of his daughter Margarethe.
“According to the most recent provenance research, Klimt’s model was possibly not Margarethe Constance Lieser, Lilly Lieser’s niece, but one of her daughters (with Justus), or Helene, the eldest, born in 1898, or the his sister Annie, who was three years younger,” the auction house said on its website.
It is also unclear what happened to the painting after Klimt’s death in 1918, especially what happened after Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938 and persecuted the country’s Jews, expropriated them and sent them to concentration camps.
Margarethe left Austria for Hungary and then the United Kingdom, but the auction house says the painting demonstrably never left Austria. Lilly Lieser stayed in Vienna until she was deported in 1942 and was killed in Auschwitz the following year.
His daughters returned to Vienna after World War II to recover their possessions, but the painting was not mentioned in any of the documents, he told Im Kinsky.
“It was these many ambiguities and historical gaps that led the current owners to contact the legal successors of the Lieser family and agree to a ‘fair solution’ with all of them in 2023,” he told Im Kinsky, without identifying the current owners.
“It was agreed not to disclose the contents of this agreement; but it can be stated that all conceivable claims of all parties involved were resolved and met through the auction of the work of art,” he said.
“The agreement essentially means that — from a purely legal standpoint — it is irrelevant who commissioned the painting from Gustav Klimt and which of the three young women in question it depicts.”
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