The painting, which once belonged to emigrant Otto Kallir, is estimated at around $45 million
It shows a lake, but it went across the pond: The landscape painting “Island in the Attersee”, created in 1902 during Gustav Klimt’s first summer stay in Litzlberg, belonged to Otto Kallir, the founder of the “Neue Galerie”, today’s gallery, for a long time St. Stephen in Vienna. In 1939 Kallir had to emigrate – first to Paris, where he founded the “Galerie St. Etienne” (French for St. Stephen), and later to New York, where he opened a gallery of the same name. When he organized the first Klimt solo show in the USA in 1959, the work was on display.
The painting will be up for auction at Sotheby’s on May 16: the estimated value is given “in the region of US$ 45 million”. However, the auction record for a landscape painting by Klimt is significantly higher: The painting “Buchenwald/Birkenwald”, restituted from the Belvedere and later owned by Microsoft founder Paul Allen, fetched a price of US$ 104.5 million last year.
“Portrait of Sisters” in the Leopold Museum
A comparable picture of the “Island on the Attersee” is now in the Leopold Museum (“Am Attersee”, 1900). Sotheby’s is positioning the painting now being auctioned off as the work that was instrumental in making Klimt famous in the United States. In fact, the St. Etienne Gallery played a major role in making the epoch “Vienna around 1900” known in the USA. Otto Kallir’s granddaughter, Jane Kallir, is a central authority on the work of Egon Schiele as the author of the catalog raisonné and has also curated several exhibitions in Austria. She ran the Galerie St. Etienne as a commercial art dealership until 2021, after which it was transformed into the “Kallir Research Institute” with non-profit status. A Sotheby’s spokeswoman did not want to answer whether Kallir or the institute is also the consignor of the picture.
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2023-04-25 16:24:29
#Klimts #Island #Attersee #auction #York
