The “Portrait of Miss Leeser”by Gustav Klimt, a painting left unfinished by the Austrian painter’s death, was sold at auction today Wednesday (24.4.24) for 30 million eurosdespite the question marks that remain to this day about its subject and its previous owners.
For years, the well-preserved, unsigned work was thought lost, but it actually graced the walls of a villa near Vienna, according to the auction house Im Kinsky who presented it in January and promoted it for sale. Im Kinsky had valued him between 30-50 million euros.
It depicts a girl, probably a teenager, in a turquoise dress and a light blue, floral scarf, against a red background. Her alabaster skin and piercing brown eyes contrast with her black, curly hair.
Although Klimt presented her so clearly, it is unclear who exactly “Miss Leeser” was.
The brothers Adolf and Justus Lieser were wealthy industrialists of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and made a fortune manufacturing ropes and twine from jute and hemp. Henriette Amalie Lieser-Landau, or ‘Lily’, had married Justus but they divorced in 1905. She was a well-known patron of artists and may have commissioned the portrait of one of her daughters. But it could also be Margarete Leeser, Adolf’s daughter.
“According to the most recent research, Klimt’s model was probably not Margarete Constance Leeser, Lilie Leeser’s niece, but one of the latter’s two daughters (with Justus), or Helene, the eldest, born in 1898, or her 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 – since it should have been in his studio – and in particular after the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938, when the country’s Jews were deported, sent to concentration camps and their properties were expropriated.
The only photograph of the painting known today was probably taken in 1925 as part of an exhibition of it and suggested that it belonged to Lily Leeser that year.
Margarete left Austria for Hungary and then for Britain, but the painting remained in the country. Lili Lieser stayed in Vienna until she was deported in 1942 and died in Auschwitz the following year. Her daughters returned to Vienna after World War II to claim their fortune, but the painting was not mentioned in any documents, according to Im Kinsky.
According to the newspaper Der Standard, based on the correspondence archives of an Austrian museum, Lili Lieser may have entrusted the painting to a member of her service staff before she was sent to the extermination camp.
The painting reappeared to a Nazi art dealer from whom it was inherited first by his daughter and then by some of her distant relatives.
“These doubts and historical gaps prompted the current owners to contact the successors of the Leeser family and reach a ‘fair deal’ with them in 2023,” the auction house explained, without naming the painting’s owners. The content of the agreement remains confidential, but it is understood that all claims of each side will be resolved by the sale of the project.
“The agreement essentially means that, from a purely legal point of view, it does not matter who commissioned the painting from Gustav Klimt and which of the three young women is depicted in it,” he added.
