Klimt and Schiele superstars with thorns

For Klimt, starting with the sensational return of the five paintings in the Belvedere Museum to the descendants of the Bloch-Bauer family in 2006, most of the works that passed onto the market had legal aftermaths of multi-million dollar lawsuits between those who claimed to have bought in good faith and groups of heirs claiming the return of paintings that may have been commissioned by their ancestors.

In recent weeks, the 'Silver Fish' owned by Bank Austria and exhibited on loan at the Albertina, claimed by the heirs of the Viennese art dealer Hans Lion, and the portrait of the African prince William Nii Nortey Dowuona, dated 1897, a painting that had been missing for decades and was valued at EUR 15 million at the Tefaf exhibition in March, but which the Hungarian authorities demanded to be seized: the person who wanted to sell it had brought it into Austria from Hungary without proper authorisation, not having declared that it was a Klimt.

Curiously, it was precisely that painting that had been brought to safety from Vienna to Hungary after Austria's annexation by National Socialist Germany, and from there was never returned to its rightful owner Ernestine Klein.

Egon Schiele, Nudo femminile 1917. Courtesy Dorotheum. LD

Time gaps often open up in the pedigree of many works by Schiele and Klimt that dealers and auction houses do not always really try to fill, so that what plays out time and time again is a classic script centred on masterpieces originally owned by wealthy Viennese Jewish families, confiscated by the Nazis or sold cheaply under pressure, both at the time of the Third Reich and, unfortunately, with similar methods in the post-war period, when at least initially the purchases were made by far-sighted collectors who were not always completely unaware of the works' bloody provenance, since many of the pre-war owners had been exterminated in the Lagers.

The provenance suggested by Sotheby's for the paintings in the New York auction on 18 November from the Lauder collection seems to be against the trend, i.e. without the usual conspicuous gaps, both for the two landscapes in the usual Klimt square format of 110 x 110 cm, and for the magnificent portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, which was commissioned from Klimt by the young woman's mother, Serena, a great patron of Viennese Modernism together with her husband August. Confiscated during the Nazi era, the painting was returned to its rightful owners in 1948 after a failed attempt to put it up for sale by circumventing ownership. After that, further steps would rule out opaque transactions.+

Indicative of a fabulous art-loving world annihilated by the endless greed of small and large Nazi hierarchs alike, is the fact that Schiele's gouache also came from Serena Lederer's fabulous collection. The subsequent passages, the Dorotheum admits, are, however, lacking "despite extensive research". In addition to the Lederer family's ownership, for the first certain piece of information one has to go back to the 1970s, when it was owned by a Viennese businessman, whose heirs are now putting it up for sale.

Sowing seeds of serenity, the Viennese auction house announced that a preliminary agreement had been signed between the Lederer heirs and the current owners for the division of the auction proceeds. Preliminary agreements are after all the solution that the art market has found for some years now to pragmatically defuse possible claims around a major sale. But it does not always work.

One example of this is Klimt's 'Portrait of Miss Lieser', which suddenly reappeared last year and was put up for sale with media hype by the Viennese auction house Im Kinsky on 24 April 2024. The valuable portrait was indeed sold in a flash auction, but the unexpected appearance of a new heir, who had not been included in the deal designed to clear the field of more than possible lawsuits, blocked the sale and delivery to the Asian buyer.