Bildnis Fräulein Lieser

Klimt painted this young woman in 1917, in what turned out to be the last year of his life. He died the following February, after a stroke, and the portrait was still unfinished on his easel, the face and hands carefully worked, patches of the background barely begun. Then it vanished. For nearly a century it was known only from a single black-and-white photograph taken in 1925, and scholars assumed it lost or destroyed. It surfaced again in Vienna in 2024 and sold at auction for about 30 million euros. Much about it is still unsettled, including the name of the sitter and where the picture spent the decades that included Austria's years under Nazi rule, a gap that has kept its ownership in dispute since the sale.