“Disappeared” Klimt painting sold for 350 million

The auction house im Kinsky, which held the bidding for the painting “Portrait of Miss Lieser” on Wednesday, writes in a statement that the fate of the artwork after 1925 is unclear, reports the BBC. It was the wealthy Jewish family Lieser who commissioned the painting from the artist in 1917.

The painting is said to depict one of the daughters of Adolf Lieser or his brother Justus and his wife Henriette Lieser, but there is disagreement as to who Klimt actually depicted. He never finished the painting before he died in 1918. Since then, the work has not been seen in public until the most recent owners submitted it to the auction house in January. By then, the painting had been gone for over 100 years, writes Forbes.

When World War II began and Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938, parts of the Lieser family were sent to concentration camps, others escaped. But the artwork appears to have never left Austria, according to Reuters.

Archival research suggests the painting may have been traded for food during World War II before its then-owner, Henriette Lieser, was sent to Auschwitz where she died in 1943, Bloomberg reports.

When Henriette’s daughters came back to Austria after the war and were to take care of their mother’s estate, there was never any mention of the existence of a Klimt painting.

Many expensive works of art that were owned by Jews in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s were stolen by the Nazis during the war. At the same time, researchers do not believe that “Portrait of Miss Lieser” is one of them, reports Forbes. It is clear that another Austrian family took over the painting in the 1960s and then let it hang in their living room. The last owner was the heir to the Austrian family, before it was bought today by an anonymous bidder from Hong Kong, according to Bloomberg.

The auction house had valued the work of art at between SEK 350 million and SEK 580 million. The club thus fell on a bid of the lower grade, which the auction house believes is due to the ambiguities surrounding the work’s history, reports Bloomberg.