2024-04-25 13:49:35
image source, AFP
Comment on the photo, The painting is believed to depict the daughter of a wealthy Jew, Adolf or Justus Leiser.Item information
- Author, Bethany Bell
- Role, BBC News – Vienna
-
4 hours ago
A painting by Austrian artist Gustav Klimt, thought lost for 100 years, has been sold at auction in Vienna.
The unfinished painting, believed to be a “Portrait of Fraulein Leiser,” was valued at 30 million euros ($32 million).
In 1917, the family of a Jewish merchant asked the painter Klimt to paint the picture, a year before his death.
But many questions remain unanswered regarding the painting, who the woman in the photo is, as well as what happened to the painting during the Nazi era.
It is believed to depict one of the daughters of Adolf or Justus Leiser, two brothers from a wealthy Jewish industrial family.
Art historians Tobias Nutter and Alfred Weidinger claim that the painting belongs to Margarete Constance Leyser, daughter of Adolf Leyser.
But the M. Kinski auction house in Vienna, which sold the work, indicates that the painting might also depict one of the daughters of Justus Leiser and his wife Henriette.
Henriette, known as Lili, was a patron of modern art, before she and her family were deported by the Nazis and died in the Auschwitz concentration camp during the Holocaust.
But his daughters, Helen and Annie, managed to survive World War II.
The exact fate of the painting following 1925 is “unclear,” the auction house said in a statement.
But “what we know is that it was acquired by the legal counsel of the owner of the work in the 1960s and transmitted to the current owner through three successive inheritances.”
The identity of the current Austrian owners has not been announced.
The painting was sold on behalf of the owners and legal heirs of Adolf and Henriette Leiser, based on the Washington Principles, an international agreement to return Nazi-looted artworks to the descendants of the people to whom they were given. been taken.
“We have an agreement, in accordance with the Washington principles, with the whole family,” Ernest Blewell of M Kinski Auctions told the BBC.
The Mr. Kinski catalog calls this agreement a “fair and equitable solution”.
But Erika Jacobovits, executive director of the Austrian Jewish Community Presidency, said there were still “many unanswered questions.”
She called for the matter to be investigated by an “independent party.”
She added: “The restoration of works of art is a very sensitive issue. It must be the subject of careful and detailed research, and the result must be understandable and transparent.”
“We must also ensure that there is a developed and modern system of special compensation in the future,” said Erika.
Klimt’s works have already fetched huge sums at auction.
His painting “The Woman and the Fan” sold for £85.3 million at Sotheby’s in June 2023, making it the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction in Europe.
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