Long-lost Klimt sells at auction for £26m
A LOST portrait by celebrated Austrian artist Gustav Klimt sold at auction yesterday for £26million.
The modernist painter – whose best known works include The Kiss – started work on the Portrait of Fräulein Lieser in 1917, the year before he died.
No one knows the identity of the young woman. Klimt left the painting, with small parts unfinished, in his studio when he died of a stroke in early 1918.
It was then given to the family who had commissioned it, according to the im Kinsky auction house in Vienna. The Jewish family fled Austria after 1930 and lost most of their possessions.
It is unclear what happened to the painting between 1925 and the 1960s, a period during which Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938.
The auction house said ‘a painting of such rarity, artistic significance and value has not been available on the art market in central Europe for decades’. The buyer wasn’t identified.