Said to be lost for almost a century, the Portrait of Fräulein Liesera late masterpiece by Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), resurfaced in broad daylight at the beginning of 2024. Its subsequent auction by the Viennese auction house im Kinsky constituted one of the major events on the European art market. However, the hammer blow, which set the auction at 30 million euros – the floor level of the initial estimate which oscillated between 30 and 50 million – did not extinguish the controversies surrounding its history.
While a global amicable agreement had been concluded beforehand between the Austrian holders of the painting and the identified descendants of the Lieser family, a new claim has upset this consensus. Patricia Leahy has formally filed a lawsuit in New York State Supreme Court against im Kinsky and the work’s consignee, claiming she was excluded from negotiations and provenance research.
Patricia Leahy’s approach is not limited to an administrative challenge for lack of consultation. The legal action brought in New York aims to legally reclassify the journey of the painting as a complete Nazi spoliation. The plaintiff relies in particular on the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery (HEAR) Act, American federal legislation which extends the limitation periods for claiming works of art confiscated during the period of National Socialism. By bringing the case before the American courts, the plaintiff is circumventing the Austrian contractual framework. She claims to be the granddaughter of the industrialist Adolf Lieser (and therefore the niece of Margarethe Lieser, one of the potential models in the painting), a status of direct beneficiary which, according to her, invalidates the agreement to share revenue from the sale signed in 2023 under the aegis of the auction house.
Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), Portrait of Miss Lieser1917, oil on canvas, 140 x 80 cm.
Material and documentary uncertainty constitutes the heart of the debate. Begun in 1917, the painting remained unfinished in Gustav Klimt’s studio when he died in February 1918. It was then given to the commissioning family. The work was historically known to researchers only through a single black and white photograph taken in 1925 by the art studio of Franz Xaver Setzer’s firm, a photograph now kept in the Austrian National Library (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek).
From this date, the trajectory of the portrait becomes completely opaque. Its exact itinerary between 1925 and 1960 – the year when the family of the seller of 2024 came into possession of the painting through a local estate – remains unknown. This chronological vagueness covers precisely the period of the Anschluss and the Second World War, a phase during which the Jewish Lieser family was persecuted, robbed and forced into exile. A contextual element reinforces suspicions of dispossession: the deportation in 1942 of Lilly Lieser, a major figure in the family, who died in captivity at Auschwitz after the total expropriation of her property by Hitler’s authorities.
The mystery of the model’s identity: three family hypotheses
The precise identity of the young woman who posed for Klimt remains a subject of scientific controversy, the artist’s archives being silent on this point. Historical research focuses on three cousins from two distinct branches of this dynasty of great Jewish textile industrialists. It could be Margarethe Lieser, the daughter of Adolf and Silivia Lieser, Helene Lieser, the daughter of Justus and Henriette (Lilly) Lieser, or her sister Annie.
The im Kinsky auction house publicly maintained that it was most likely that the model was Helene or Annie, the daughters of Justus and Lilly Lieser. Paradoxically, if this scenario validates the thesis of historical spoliation by force (due to the dramatic fate of Lilly), it is used by the auction house to contest the standing of Patricia Leahy, the latter belonging to the Adolf branch and not to that of Justus. However, an in-depth investigation published by the Austrian daily Der Standard, based on administrative correspondence and passport applications found in the national archives, confirms that provenance research had not formally identified all living descendants at the time of signing the pre-auction agreement.
In its defense, im Kinsky recalls that the 2024 auction took place within a strict legal framework. In 2023, the auction house obtained a final export permit issued by the Austrian Federal Monuments Agency (Bundesdenkmalamt). Since private institutions are not subject to the Austrian law of 1998 on the restitution of cultural property (which only binds state museums), im Kinsky chose to apply the Washington Conference Principles applicable to works of art confiscated by the Nazis (1998).
