Opinion Express View: Afterlife of Fräulein Lieser
A Klimt artwork has been found after nearly 100 years. It reiterates the Austrian artist's radical appeal
The sumptuous and the sensual, the abstract and the everyday came together on his canvas in a rich riot of metallic hues and textured details. It had always driven up the price of his work, especially his portraits. In 2006, for instance, his 1907 portrait, Adele Bloch-Bauer I, sold for $135 million. It remains to be seen if Fraulein Lieser has a similar fortuitous afterlife. 
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In June last year, Austrian artist Gustav Klimt’s Lady With a Fan sold for a staggering $108.4 million at Sotheby’s, London, to become the most expensive artwork to be sold at an auction in Europe. It was one of the artist’s two unfinished paintings, both portraits of young women, found in his studio in Vienna following his death from Spanish flu in 1918. The other, Portrait of Fräulein Lieser, commissioned by a wealthy Jewish industrialist, had been lost for nearly a century, its sole record a black-and-white photograph archived in the Austrian National Library from the time of its last exhibition in 1925. Now, the discovery of the latter in a private collection in Vienna has renewed anticipation of another blockbuster sale when the 31-by-55-inch portrait goes to auction in late April in the Austrian capital.
Portrait of Fräulein Lieser shows a clear-eyed young woman in a green dress and a richly embroidered blue coat. While the exact identity of the woman — and the fate of the painting during the period between 1925 and 1960, when it was acquired by the family of the present owner — remains unresolved, it is a classic Klimt, reminiscent of his later-era preoccupation with portraits commissioned by Austria’s elite.
The excitement over the portrait is indicative of Klimt’s larger legacy. He might be best known for The Kiss, an elaborate oil-on-canvas rendition of a couple in embrace, but as one of the leaders of the anti-establishment Vienna Secession movement that upended contemporary understanding of the purpose of art, Klimt’s radical appeal lay in his melding together elements of craft and design in his art. The sumptuous and the sensual, the abstract and the everyday came together on his canvas in a rich riot of metallic hues and textured details. It had always driven up the price of his work, especially his portraits. In 2006, for instance, his 1907 portrait, Adele Bloch-Bauer I, sold for $135 million. It remains to be seen if Fraulein Lieser has a similar fortuitous afterlife.
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