An artwork by the Austrian painter Gustav Klimt, which was thought to be lost for a century, was recently auctioned off in Vienna.
Unfinished Portrait of Fraulein Lieser brought about €30 million (£26 million; $32 million). One year before Klimt’s passed in 1917, a family of Jewish industrialists commissioned it.
There are, nevertheless, a lot of unresolved issues surrounding the artwork, including disagreements over the identity of the woman in the image and what happened to it during the Nazi occupation. It is thought to feature one of the daughters of either Adolf or Justus Lieser, brothers belonging to a wealthy Jewish industrialist family.
According to art historians Tobias Natter and Alfred Weidinger, Margarethe Constance Lieser, the daughter of Adolf Lieser, is depicted in the painting. However, the artwork’s auction house, im Kinsky in Vienna, says the picture might also represent one of Justus Lieser and his wife Henriette’s two daughters.
Henriette, also called Lilly, was a modern art patron. During the Holocaust, she was transported by the Nazis and perished at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Both of her daughters, Annie and Helene, made it through World War II.
In a statement, the auction house stated that it was “unclear” what would happen to the painting after 1925.
