Lost Klimt portrait's €30m sale collapses into New York lawsuit
A €30 million bid for a Gustav Klimt portrait thought lost for decades did not end in a sale. It ended in court.
The painting is Portrait of Fräulein Lieser. Klimt painted it in 1917 and it was still unfinished in his Vienna studio when he died in 1918. It then vanished from public view for decades before resurfacing in 2024, according to The New York Times.
Auction house Im Kinsky in Vienna set 24 April 2024 as the sale date. It showed the work in a catalogue exhibition from 13 to 21 April, from 10am to 5pm, and said admission to the auction room would be by appointment only. At the time Im Kinsky described the sellers only as Austrian private citizens.
In the room, advisory firm Patti Wong & Associates bid €30 million on behalf of an anonymous Hong Kong buyer, according to The Art Newspaper. That was the highest price ever bid at an auction in Austria. Reuters reported the next day that the work had fetched US$32 million.
That sale did not complete. The €30 million transaction was cancelled because of disputes over provenance, the documented chain of ownership.
The dispute centres on who asked Klimt for the portrait and who sits for it. The authors of the Klimt catalogue raisonné, the full scholarly listing of his work, believe it was commissioned by Adolf Lieser and depicts his daughter Margarethe. Im Kinsky said at the time of the sale there were indications it was instead commissioned by Henriette Lieser-Landau, the former wife of Justus Lieser, and depicts one of her two daughters.
Henriette Lieser-Landau was deported in 1942 and murdered by the Nazis in 1943. The question of how the painting left the family, and who now holds the rights connected to it, remains unresolved.
A proposed settlement would have split any sale revenue 60% to claimants who are heirs of Adolf Lieser and Henriette Lieser-Landau and 40% to Eva Ropper, the current holder and consignor of the work. The consignor is the person who entrusts a work to an auction house for sale.
That agreement did not settle the matter. In April, Patricia Leahy filed a complaint in the Supreme Court of the State of New York against Im Kinsky and Ropper. Leahy is the granddaughter of Hans Lieser, who was Margarethe’s brother. Her suit contends the portrait depicts her great-aunt.
Leahy alleges the Hong Kong buyer sought releases from all potential claimants and then withdrew after failing to reach an agreement with her, because she had not been included in the earlier settlement. Her suit asks the court for a declaratory judgment, a ruling on legal rights without damages, that she is a rightful heir and owner, and that Im Kinsky and Ropper deliver the painting to her.
By mid-October 2026, six months after the complaint was announced, it had still not been served on Ropper, according to her Vienna lawyer Robert Bachner. Service is the formal delivery of court papers that starts proceedings against a defendant.
For readers, this means the portrait has no clear next step. There is a bid on the record, no completed sale, and competing claims to ownership now before a New York court.
