Klimt Portrait Lawsuit Filed in New York Over Nazi Loot Claim

A lawsuit has been filed in the New York State Supreme Court contesting the sale of Gustav Klimt's "Portrait of Fräulein Lieser," which sold for €30 million at auction in Vienna in April 2024. The plaintiff, Patricia Leahy, claims she was excluded from negotiations and provenance research, and seeks to reclassify the painting's history as Nazi looting under the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery (HEAR) Act. The painting, begun in 1917 and left unfinished in Klimt's studio at his death in 1918, was known only from a 1925 photograph. Its whereabouts from 1925 to 1960 are unknown, a period covering the Anschluss and WWII when the Jewish Lieser family was persecuted. Lilly Lieser was deported to Auschwitz in 1942. The auction house im Kinsky had reached a settlement with identified descendants in 2023 and obtained an export permit from Austria's Federal Monuments Office. The identity of the sitter remains disputed among three cousins. A Der Standard investigation found that not all living descendants were identified before the sale agreement.