On Wednesday, a European auction house will put up a Gustav Klimt painting for sale, with a pre-sale estimate of at least 30 million euros (about $32 million).
Anyone who buys it will not only be getting a painting by an artist whose main works are rarely for sale, but also one whose subject matter, provenance, and current ownership are unknown, unpublished, and controversial. You will also get portraits that are not targeted.
The auctioneer selling this painting is not an international giant like Sotheby's or Christie's, but a local Viennese house, Mr. Kinski, whose largest sale was in 2010 for a painting by Egon Schiele. It was $6.1 million.
At a press conference in January announcing the sale of the mysterious Klimt work, Ernst Preuhl, co-chief executive officer of Im Kinski, said: Whenever there is a debate about something, there will always be counter-arguments. ”
Part of the discussion centers on the identity of the young women depicted. Other questions arise as to what happened to the work during the Anschluss period, when Austria was annexed to the Third Reich.
The painting belonged to a Jewish family at the time, and documents record what happened to it during a time when Austrian Jews were persecuted, deported, murdered, and their property looted by the Nazis. does not exist.
Questions surrounding the portrait have added to the interest in selling the work by Klimt, one of the founders of the influential Vienna Secession movement. Klimt's highly decorative paintings are now among the most coveted trophies on the art market. His “Lady With a Fan” sold for $108.4 million at Sotheby's in London last June.
The story of the painting, known as “Portrait of Fraulein Rieser,” begins in Vienna in 1917, when the teenage daughter of a wealthy Jewish family makes one of nine visits to Klimt's studio to pose. He became one of the first.
Klimt's notes provide clues to the subject's identity, but they are not satisfying. There, a visit from a “squirrel” is recorded, indicating that he is a member of the wealthy Rieser family. However, Justus and Adolf Rieser, the two German-born brothers who founded Austria's first mechanical hemp rope and twine factory, each had teenage daughters.
The portrait was never completed. Art historians believe this unsigned canvas was in Klimt's studio when he died in 1918 during the influenza pandemic. For decades, this painting was known only from his one black-and-white photograph taken in the 1920s. After that, the whereabouts of this portrait became largely unknown.
The auction house said “Fräulein Rieser'' depicts Helene, one of Henriette Rieser's two teenage daughters, known as Lily, who became a prominent economist, or Annie, a renowned dancer. This suggests that there may be. A member of turn-of-the-century Vienna's wealthiest Landau family, Lily divorced Justus Rieser in 1905, and she became a patron of the Viennese avant-garde.
Im Kinski's proposal is based on an inventory card on an old black-and-white photographic negative of this painting in the Austrian National Library. The card shows that in 1925 the portrait was displayed in Lilly's palatial home on Rue Argentinier.
According to the catalog, Lily was deported by the Nazis in 1942 and murdered at Auschwitz in 1943.
However, her daughters survived the Holocaust. Neither is known to have attempted to locate or claim Klimt after World War II. And this painting does not appear in the Declaration of Valuable Assets of Lili Reeser, which all Jews in Germany and Austria had to make for the Nazis in 1938.
However, recent research and an article in the Austrian newspaper Der Standard support the view that the portrait is of one of Lily's daughters. The article describes a recently discovered 1961 letter in the archives of the Mumok Museum of Modern Art in Vienna, indicating that the painting belonged to a man named Adolf Hagenauer at the time.
In a letter, Hagenauer was criticized by curator and future museum director Werner Hoffman, who accused Hagenauer of obtaining portraits from Jews who, like Lily, “died in gas chambers.” It was done.
According to research by Georg Gaugsch, author of a 5,000-page history of Vienna's Jewish upper middle class, during the Anschluss era, Hagenauer, managing director of the family grocery store, was married to Lili Rieser, the butler's daughter. was married to
Gorgush and Olga Kronsteiner, who wrote the article for Der Standard, wrote that in 1938, when Hagenauer is recorded as having applied to join the Nazi party, Lily was sent to obtain food during the heightening persecution of Jews. raises the possibility that the painting was exchanged with Hagenauer.
According to Der Standard, Hagenauer eventually gave Klimt to his daughter. The newspaper reported that her daughter bequeathed the painting to her distant relative, who passed away last year (the seller is currently undisclosed). In an email, Proyl said Der Standard was right on this point.
However, Klimt experts Tobias Nutter and Alfred Weidinger believe that the painting actually depicts another teenage girl, Margarethe Constance Liesel, the daughter of Justus' brother Adolf and his wife Sylvia. claim to be drawing. Adolf He died in 1919. Margarete moved to Budapest in 1938, where she married Hungarian Catholic convert Henri de Gelsee in 1921, followed by her mother.
Weidinger said in an email that he was introduced to Margarete's son, investment banker William de Guercy, in 2007. He said De Guercy, who died childless in London in 2021, asked him to help track down the painting.
Weidinger said he was sure that Klimt had painted a portrait of his mother: “He said there was no doubt about it because his family always talked about the portrait of his mother.”
De Goerzee had made a provision in his will that if the painting was rediscovered and sold, it would be donated to a Catholic charity, but the Art Loss Registry's database, which locates and recovers stolen art, is not available. Klimt's portrait was never registered as missing.
Mr. Weidinger and Mr. Nutter said the auction house did not request their opinion on the painting. “Contrary to all international standards, the auction house was unable to involve two leading Klimt experts who have published catalog raisonnés,” Nutter said in an email.
Im Kinski said in an email that he did not approach Mr. Nutter because his views on the paintings were known in the catalogue, but he did consult at least three independent art historians.
Im Kinski's auction catalog states that as part of the effort to sell the painting, the current owners have acknowledged the “many ambiguities and historical gaps” in its provenance and have contacted the legal heirs of the Rieser family. It states that a “fair and just resolution” has been reached. The agreement meant that from a “purely legal standpoint” it was “not important” who commissioned the painting or which of Rieser's three daughters was depicted.
Regardless of which Rieser's daughter is depicted, the painting was obtained illegally during the Nazi era, Proyle said. “All forms of Nazi-era looting must be treated as illegal,” he said.
Asked whether the charity named by De Gerzey would be the beneficiary of the auction, Proil, who is also a partner at the Vienna law firm Proil Boesch, said in an email that confidentiality clauses prevent him from commenting on that point. Although he cannot do so, he said, “I will be the beneficiary of all of them.'' The legal successors of Adolf, Justus and Henriette Rieser are also included in the agreement. ”
Jill Birnbaum, a lawyer at the London law firm Wedrake Bell, which is handling De Guersey's estate, said the settlement also includes the heirs of William and his brother Alexander, who died in 2006. .
Under Austrian law, in certain circumstances, instead of formal return of looted art, the issue of return may be resolved by legal agreement between the owner and his successor. The work must then obtain an export permit from the state. The Austrian Federal Monuments Office issued such a license to Klimt on October 23, 2023.
“Reparations is a very sensitive issue and we need to do a lot of research and get the information very accurate,” said the president of Vienna's Jewish community Israel Kultusgemeinde Wien. Erika Jakubowicz said.
“Only the rightful heirs should settle,” Jakubowitz said. “Before we start the settlement process, we need to prepare a legal opinion on the heirs,” she added, adding that questions still remain about who the legal heirs of “Portrait of Fraulein Rieser” are. He hinted that he thought there was.
The latest research, reported in Der Standard, takes the view that the Rieser girl is likely a future economist Helen, but in an email, Proyl said He said it was important not to be too specific about the subject of the portrait. .
He said lawyers for the de Gersee family “remain firmly committed to the contrary opinion that Adolf Rieser commissioned the painting and that it depicts Margarethe Rieser and not Helene.”
Because it is not definitive, Proyle said, “the catalog will not be changed or amended.”
Klimt scholar Nutter said the girl's identity had broader implications. “Identification information is important because it can be traced back to the commissioner and can tell you a lot about provenance and ownership history,” he said. “It really makes a difference.”