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 least 30 million euros (about $32 million).
Whoever buys it’ll receive a portray by an artist whose main works not often come up on the market, but additionally 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, an area home in Vienna whose greatest 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 government of im Kinsky, mentioned: “All is in the dead of night. Each time there’s an argument for one thing, counterarguments come up many times.”
Among the debate facilities on the identification of the younger girl portrayed. Different questions have arisen about what occurred to the art work throughout the Anschluss, when Austria was annexed into the Third Reich.
The portray was owned by a Jewish household throughout that interval, and there are not any paperwork that report 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, referred to 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 identification of the topic. It data 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 cord manufacturing unit, 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, throughout the influenza pandemic. For many years the portray has solely been identified from one black-and-white {photograph} that was taken within the Nineteen Twenties. Afterward, the portrait’s whereabouts was largely unknown.
The public sale home means that “Fräulein Lieser” may probably depict one of many two teenage daughters of Henriette Lieser, who was referred to as Lilly: both Helene, who turned 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 is predicated on a listing card on the damaging of that previous black-and-white photograph of the portray within the Austrian Nationwide Library. The cardboard signifies that in 1925, the portrait was hanging in Lilly’s palatial residence in Argentinierstrasse.
Lilly was deported by the Nazis in 1942 and murdered at Auschwitz in 1943, in response to the catalog.
However her daughters survived the Holocaust. Neither is understood to have tried to search out or declare the Klimt after World Struggle II. And the portray doesn’t seem in Lilly Lieser’s declaration of beneficial property that every one Jews in Germany and Austria had to attract up for the Nazis in 1938.
Nonetheless, latest 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 just lately found within the archive of Mumok, Vienna’s museum of recent 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.
In the course of the Anschluss, Hagenauer, the managing director of a household grocery enterprise, was married to the daughter of Lilly Lieser’s butler, in response to analysis by Georg Gaugusch, writer 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 during which Hagenauer is documented as making use of for membership of the Nazi occasion.
Hagenauer finally gave the Klimt to his daughter, in response to 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 the moment. Ploil mentioned in an electronic mail that Der Customary was appropriate on this element.
However two Klimt consultants, Tobias Natter and Alfred Weidinger, say the portray really 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 electronic 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 youngsters, 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 all the time 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 bought, 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 electronic 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 electronic mail that it had not approached Natter as a result of his views of the portray have been identified from his catalog, but it surely had consulted at the least three impartial 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 throughout the Nazi interval. “Each type of taking away throughout 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 also be a associate within the Vienna regulation agency Ploil Boesch, mentioned in an electronic 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 regulation 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 regulation, authorized agreements between house owners and successors can, in sure circumstances, settle a restitution challenge as a substitute of the formal return of a looted art work. 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 challenge, and we’ve to analysis so much and be very correct concerning the info,” mentioned Erika Jakubovits, government director of the presidency of Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien, the Jewish Group of Vienna.
“Solely the rightful heirs ought to be those to settle with,” Jakubovits mentioned. “A authorized opinion on the heirs ought 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 prone to be Helene, the long run economist, Ploil mentioned in an electronic mail that it was essential to not go too far in particularly figuring out the topic of the portrait at this junction.
He famous that attorneys for the de Gelsey household “nonetheless stick 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 identification of the lady had wider penalties. “The identification is essential 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.”
