Intrigue surrounds Klimt portrait as hammer falls for €30m

● Gustav Klimt’s “Portrait of Miss Lieser” ,a painting of a young woman left unfinished when the Austrian artist died, sold at auction on Wednesday for €30m (R600m) despite open questions about its subject and previous ownership.

The work was long thought to have been lost when in fact it was hanging in a private villa near Vienna for decades, according to the auction house Im Kinsky that put it on display in January before putting it under the hammer. It shows its subject, probably in her teens, in a turquoise dress draped in a floral gown against a red background, her alabaster skin and piercing, pale brown eyes contrasting with her dark, curly hair.

It remains unclear who “Fraeulein Lieser” actually was. The brothers Adolf and Justus Lieser were wealthy industrialists in the Austro-Hungarian empire, having built their wealth on jute and hemp, making twine and rope.

Henriette Amalie Lieser-Landau, nicknamed “Lilly”, was married to Justus until their divorce in 1905 and became a patron of the arts. It is possible she commissioned the painting of one of her daughters, or Adolf Lieser could have done so with his daughter Margarethe as the subject.

“According to the latest provenance research, Klimt’s model was possibly not Margarethe Constance Lieser, Lilly Lieser’s niece, but one of her two daughters (with Justus), either Helene, born in 1898, or her sister Annie, who was three years younger,” the auction house said on its website.

What happened to the painting after Klimt’s death in 1918, when it would have been in his studio, remains unclear, particularly what happened after Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938 and the country’s Jews were persecuted and sent to concentration camps. Margarethe left Austria for Hungary and then Britain but the auction house says the painting verifiably never left Austria.