Lost for a Century: Klimt's 'Fräulein Lieser' Resurfaces in Vienna

For almost a hundred years, Gustav Klimt's 'Portrait of Fräulein Lieser' existed only as a black-and-white photograph from 1925. Then, in early 2024, a Vienna auction house received a phone call: the painting still existed.

Unfinished, luminous and steeped in unanswered questions — who the young sitter was, who commissioned it, where it spent the Second World War — the portrait sold at Im Kinsky in April 2024 for a hammer price of €30 million, a record for any artwork auctioned in Austria.

Its history is inseparable from tragedy: the Lieser family were wealthy Jewish industrialists, and the gaps in the painting's provenance reach into the darkest years of the 20th century. A restitution settlement was negotiated with the family's heirs before the sale could proceed — a reminder that behind some masterpieces lie stories that can never be fully closed.

Image: “Gustav Klimt 047” — Gustav Klimt, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.