A portrait painted by Austrian artist Gustav Klimt in his final years is appearing at auction for the first time after being lost for around 100 years.
According to the BBC on the 26th (local time), Klimt’s painting ‘Portrait of Miss Leiser’, which has been missing since 1925, will be auctioned by Austrian auctioneer Im Kinski on April 24.
This painting, painted in 1917, a year before Klimt’s death, is a portrait of a woman from the Rieser family, a wealthy businessman in Vienna, Austria. The Reaser family, who owned the picture, were Jewish and were known to have been persecuted during the Nazi regime.
This painting, whose whereabouts have not been known since it was displayed in an exhibition in 1925, has been owned by an Austrian family since the mid-1960s and is said to hang in the living room of a mansion near Vienna.
The current owner of the photo said he inherited it from a distant relative two years ago.
Auctioneer Lim Kinski estimated the value of the painting at least $54 million (about 72.1 billion won).
Representative Im Kinski said the rediscovery of the painting was “groundbreaking” and that “a work of this rare artistic significance and value had not appeared on the central European art market for decades.”
The painting is being auctioned on behalf of the current owner and legal heirs of the Reaser family. This is due to the ‘Washington Principle’, an international convention which states that art looted by the Nazis must be returned to the successor of the original owner.
However, local Austrian media said that no concrete evidence has yet been found that the picture was looted or stolen during the Nazi regime.
Before that, another Klimt portrait, ‘Woman with a Fan’, was sold for 85.3 million pounds (about 141.3 billion won) at auction last year, breaking the highest auction price for a work of art in Europe.
‘Portrait of Miss Reaser’ will be exhibited in the UK, Switzerland, Germany and Hong Kong before being auctioned in April.
(Photo = Yonhap News)
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