LOST GUSTAV KLIMT PAINTING SOLD AT AUCTION

For 100 years, it was believed a painting by Austrian artist Gustav Klimt was lost.

The Portrait of Fraulein Lieser is an unfinished piece of work commissioned by a Jewish family in 1917. This was a year before Klimp died in 1918.

There are many questions about who the woman in the portrait is and what happened to the portrait during the Nazi era.

It’s believed the woman in the portrait could be the daughter of one of the industrialist brothers Adolf and Justus Lieser. They were brothers from a wealthy and well-known Jewish industrialist family.

At a recent auction, the unfinished portrait fetched R617 million. The auction house said it’s unclear what happened to the painting after 1925.

“What we know is that it was acquired by a legal predecessor of the consignor in the 1960s and went to the current owner through three successive inheritances.”

The identity of the current owners, only known to be Austrian, hasn’t been made public.

Image credit: TimeOut