The Klimt Portrait That Vanished for a Century

Imagine uncovering an attic canvas and finding a glimmering Gustav Klimt beneath the dust, one that scholars believed lost for nearly one hundred years. That real-life art-world shock arrived in early 2024 when Portrait of Fräulein Lieser emerged from a Viennese private collection, toured Zurich, Berlin, London and Hong Kong, and then headed for Vienna’s im Kinsky auction block.

On 24 April the bidding opened at €28 million and closed at €30 million ($32 million), quadrupling Austria’s previous price record. “Of course we are delighted at the result but not really surprised,” said Claudia Mörth-Gasser, Klimt specialist at im Kinsky, moments after the gavel fell.

Klimt began the portrait in May 1917, leaving the childlike turquoise dress and crimson backdrop loosely blocked in while rendering the sitter’s face with meticulous, pearl-toned strokes. Auction-house research notes that the contrast of delicate modeling and free brushwork captures the artist’s very last stylistic pivot.

“We have checked all archives and have found no evidence that the painting has ever been exported out of Austria, confiscated or looted..." — Claudia Mörth-Gasser, Klimt specialist at im Kinsky

The canvas was commissioned by the Jewish Lieser family, yet its trail between 1925 and the 1960s goes dark. “We have checked all archives and have found no evidence that the painting has ever been exported out of Austria, confiscated or looted,” Mörth-Gasser told reporters, while conceding that gaps remain for the Nazi era.

Studio notebooks show the unidentified sitter visited Klimt nine times that spring, leaving more than twenty-five preparatory sketches. The rediscovery gives curators fresh material to study those sittings and the unfinished passages that anticipate Klimt’s swan-song masterpiece, Lady with a Fan.

A confidential agreement, structured under the Washington Principles, divides sale proceeds between the current owners and multiple Lieser heirs, acknowledging that conclusive provenance may never be established. The arrangement allowed the work to reach the market yet kept the wartime question front and center.

Beyond its headline price, the portrait reshapes scholarship on Klimt’s late palette and renews debate about how museums and collectors handle masterpieces with incomplete histories. For art lovers, it is proof that a single rediscovered canvas can rewrite both market records and our understanding of a modernist giant.