A Gustav Klimt portrait stolen during the Nazi era reappears.
The Tefaf fair in Maastricht is showing the painting, a work that had been missing since 1938.
Maastricht (Netherlands)Another of the surprises of the edition of the Tefaf art fair, in Maastricht, It is a portrait that Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) painted in 1897 of Prince William Nii Nortey Dowuona, which had been missing since 1938. It is for sale by the Austrian gallery Wienerroither & Kohlbacher for 15 million euros, one of the highest prices. The history of the painting is marked by Nazism: the owner in the 1930s, Ernestine Klein, of Jewish origin, had to flee Vienna and took refuge in Monaco. Upon returning home, she realized that the painting and other possessions had been stolen.
Sources at the gallery explain that a collector brought the portrait to them in 2023: it was poorly framed, dirty, and the Klimt legacy label on the back was barely visible. And thanks to Professor Alfred Weidinger, they were able to confirm that it is a work by Klimt that was part of the posthumous tribute held in 1928, ten years after his death, in the Vienna Secession pavilion. At that time, it was already the property of Ernestine Klein. Furthermore, she and her husband, Fleix Klein, settled in the villa in the Hietzing district where Klimt had had his studio, currently known as the Klimt Villa.
The gallery owners confirmed that it was a work stolen during the Nazi era and began the process of returning the painting, which depicts a member of the royal family of the Osu tribe of Ghana, to the gallery's heirs. In fact, the painting is coming onto the market after the current owner and Klein's heirs reached an agreement. Sources at the gallery state that there is no record that the painting was seized by the Nazi authorities and that it likely entered the black market along with other objects that are still missing. They also claim that, after the Second World War, auction houses would not have wanted a painting like this.
Gustav Klimt met William Nii Nortey at a folklore demonstration at a human zoo in Vienna's Tiergarten am Schüttel. Nii Nortey had arrived, for a small fee, with around seventy warriors and around fifty women and children. A colleague, Franz Natsch, also came along, so the two agreed to paint the prince. While the portrait of Natsch, housed at the MNAHA in Luxembourg, is frontal, Klimt immortalized the prince from three-quarters and signed the painting in the middle of the canvas.
The portrait also recalls how Klimt, Franz Natsch, and his brother Ernst trained at the conservative Vienna School of Applied Arts and how he gradually distanced himself from them artistically, up to the turning point of the founding of the Secession. the abundance of decorative elements in Klimt's later work. Indeed, the same sources explain that this portrait predates one year one of Klimt's earliest masterpieces, the portrait of Sonia Knips, preserved in Vienna's Belvedere.
Everything indicates that Klimt kept the portrait of Nii Nortey with him until his death and that the painting was auctioned off as part of his legacy sale held in Vienna in 1923.