Displaying items by tag: Klimt

LONDON — A rare full-length portrait by Gustav Klimt sold for 24.8 million pounds with fees, or about $39 million, at a Sotheby’s auction in London on Wednesday.

Sotheby’s had placed an estimate of £12 million to £18 million (about $19 million to $28 million) on Klimt’s 1902 portrait of Gertrud Loew, the 19-year-old daughter of Dr. Anton Loew, the director of a prominent Viennese private sanatorium that treated fin-de-siècle luminaries such as Mahler, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Klimt himself.

The portrait, which had never previously been offered on the open market, was won by an unknown buyer...

An Austrian museum has announced plans to return a precious Gustav Klimt painting to the heir of its rightful owner after researchers discovered it was confiscated by Nazis during the second world war.

The painting, Litzlberg am Attersee, currently owned by the modern art museum MdM Salzburg, could be worth as much as €30m ($44m).

Research showed that the Nazis seized the 96-year-old painting from an apartment of a woman named Amalie Redlich in a village near Vienna. Redlich was deported to Poland, where she was killed, Salzburg deputy governor Wilfried Haslauer and the head of the museum, Toni Stooss, told reporters. Her 83-year-old grandson, Georges Jorisch, lives in Montreal, Canada.

The painting was bought by Salzburg art collector and dealer Friedrich Welz who exchanged it in 1944 for a piece from Salzburg's state gallery. It was subsequently taken over by the state gallery's successor, the Salzburger Residenzgalerie, in 1952 and later became part of the inventory of Salzburg's modern art museum.

"This is looted art, there's absolutely no question about that," Haslauer said in comments carried by Austrian radio Oe1.