Portrait of Miss Lieser, a painting of a young woman left unfinished due to Klimt's death, was long thought lost.
A portrait of a young woman by Gustav Klimt, long thought lost, has been sold at auction in Vienna for 30 million euros ($32 million).
The Austrian modernist artist began work on “Portrait of Miss Lieser” in 1917, a year before his death, and it is one of his last works. Bidding started at 28 million euros ($29 million), and the sale price on Wednesday was at the lower end of the expected range of 30-50 million euros ($32-53 million). The buyer has not been identified.
Im Kinsky auction house, which handled the sale, said that “a painting of such rarity, artistic significance and value has not been available on the art market in Central Europe for decades”.
The intensely colored painting was auctioned on behalf of the current owners, Austrian private citizens whose names have not been released, and the legal heirs of Adolf and Henriette Lieser, one of whom is believed to have commissioned the painting.
It is not entirely clear which member of the Lieser family was the model.
Klimt left the painting with small unfinished parts in his studio when he died of a stroke in early 1918, and it was given to the family that commissioned it, according to the auction house.
The Jewish family fled Austria after 1930 and lost most of their property.
It is not clear exactly what happened to the painting between 1925 and the 1960s, the period that includes the Nazi dictatorship. Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938.
The auction house says there is no evidence that the painting was seized at the time, but also no evidence that it wasn't. It ended up with the current owners through three successive inheritances.
Because of the uncertainty, the current owners and heirs of the Liesers drafted an agreement to proceed with the sale under the Washington Principles, which were drafted in 1998 to help resolve issues related to the return of Nazi-confiscated art.
Last year, Klimt's late-life masterpiece, Lady with a Fan, sold for 85.3 million British pounds ($108.4 million), making it the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction in Europe.
Klimt's Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II sold at a New York auction in 2006 for $87.9 million, and his Birch Forest landscape sold at Christie's in New York in 2022 for $104.6 million.
Two other portraits of his are said to have sold privately for more than $100 million.
