Klimt's “Portrait of Fräulein Lieser”: confiscated through the Nazi period | EUROtoday

EAt the top of January, the Vienna public sale home on the Kinsky offered a sensation with Gustav Klimt's “Portrait of Fräulein Lieser”, which was lengthy thought misplaced. Now there’s new details about the portray, which can be auctioned in Vienna on April twenty fourth. Until now, it was unsure who from the intensive Lieser industrial household the portrait initially belonged to. It was additionally unclear the place the work was positioned between 1925 and 1961 and whether or not it was confiscated through the Nazi period.

The “Standard” is now unearthing beforehand unknown archive materials. As early as 1961, a report about Klimt's portrait of a girl appeared within the Viennese newspaper “Die Presse”. The portray appeared when a delicatessen was relocating. The article raises the query of whether or not the unsigned, unfinished work is an actual Klimt and mentions that the artwork historian Werner Hofmann, who would turn into the founding director of the Museum of the twentieth Century in Vienna in 1962 (the later mumok), took half in a presentation of the I’ve proven curiosity within the image within the deliberate museum.

It belonged to Lilly Lieser

Based on this, the “Standard” discovered six letters within the archives of the mumok (Museum of Modern Art Foundation Ludwig Vienna) that Hofmann wrote in 1961 to a sure Adolf Hagenauer – the delicatessen supplier who claimed to have found Klimt's work in his warehouse. The entrepreneur, who illegally joined the NSDAP in 1933, was apparently unable to supply Hofmann with a purchase order affirmation or every other doc to show the authorized buy.

Hofmann sharply criticized Hagenauer in a letter: “The fact that the picture comes from Jewish ownership and that its owner died in the gas chambers excludes the possibility of legally and morally thinking people selling the picture or incorporating it into the family's assets “. This letter passage also shows who the picture came into Hagenauer's possession: the Viennese patron Henriette Amalie “Lilly” Lieser, née Landau, who was murdered as a Jew within the Auschwitz focus camp in 1943.

How precisely the murals got here from Lilly Lieser's possession to that of the delicatessen stays unclear. What is for certain is that Lieser's property had been frozen after the annexation of Austria, she needed to pay the “Reich Flight Tax” and the “Jewish Property Levy” from the proceeds of foreclosed properties, and she or he had hardly any money accessible within the 4 years as much as her deportation. According to the “Standard”, one in all her former tenants stated she lived by promoting her belongings throughout this time.

The new findings relating to the provenance historical past haven’t any influence on the deliberate public sale of the work, which is estimated at 30 to 40 million euros. On the recommendation of Kinsky managing director Ernst Ploil, the consignor has already reached an settlement with Lieser's authorized successors in accordance with the Washington Principles a few share within the public sale proceeds. The lawyer Ploil defined his place on restitution within the journal “Falter”: “I am in favor of reversing the burden of proof. If there is a shadow, then the case should be treated as if there were a claim for restitution.” In distinction to worldwide competitors, Kinsky will solely take over the lot as soon as the provenance has been clarified and an settlement has already been reached with any heirs.