A woman claiming to be the sole heir to the Austrian subject of a long-lost Gustav Klimt painting has sued for restitution of the portrait, which came to auction at the small Austrian auction house Im Kinsky in 2024. The painting sold on a single bid for $37.5 million, setting a record for any artwork sold at auction in Austria, but the bidder, a Hong Kong collector represented by Patti Wong and Associates, withdrew their offer after the sale.
South Carolina–based Patricia J. Leahy, on her own behalf and that of Nickolas Johann Kraft and Hans Lieser, filed a suit in New York State Supreme Court on Thursday. The suit names Austria’s Eva Ropper and the auction house as defendants. Leahy is represented by Cleveland-based firm Baker & Hostetler.
The dispute is over Portrait of Fräulein Margarethe Lieser, which Klimt was working on when he died suddenly in 1918. The Lieser family of Jewish industrialists was persecuted by the Nazis, including being imprisoned, and lost almost all their possessions to Nazi seizure.
Adolf Lieser, Margarethe’s father, commissioned the portrait; Leahy says she is his sole great-grandchild, and sole grandchild of Margarethe’s brother Hans.
Before the Vienna sale, the painting had been out of sight for a century. It was assumed to have been seized by the Nazis in 1938 or later. Kinsky, the complaint claims, listed the painting without the subject’s given name and “eschewing the accepted provenance.” The auctioneer offered a new interpretation of the painting, saying it may have shown a different subject. The house said that all rightful heirs had been identified and included in “a fair and just solution,” saying that it had been reached under the 1998 Washington Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art. (Im Kinsky did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
False, says Leahy, who claims she was never even contacted and in fact contested the sale before it went to the auction block.
While the house did not identify the consignor, Leahy’s lawyers claim it is Eva Ropper, acting through her son, Richard Ropper.
Leahy even says she was threatened with legal action by a law firm purporting to be acting on behalf of other heirs if she tried to stand in the way of the sale.
Auctioneer Oliver Barker just before he strikes his gavel to sell Gustav Klimt’s portrait of Elisabeth Lederer.
Julian Cassady Photography/Courtesy Sotheby’s
Leahy’s lawyers describe the $37.5 million sale price as “well under market.” In fact, Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer (1914–16) sold for $236.4 million at Sotheby’s New York in November, notching a new auction high not only for the artist but for any work of modern art sold at auction, and becoming the second-priciest artwork ever sold at auction. His 1917 Dame mit Fächer (Lady with a Fan) fetched $108.6 million at Sotheby’s London in 2023, becoming the most expensive painting ever to sell at auction in Europe.
The buyer tried, per the complaint, to reach an agreement with all potential claimants, but withdrew their bid when that attempt failed. The complaint says that the painting is still in Kinsky’s possession but says that counsel for Kinsky and Ropper “have stopped responding to communications.”
The artist began his portrait sessions with Lieser in 1917; small portions remained unfinished and the painting unsigned when he died in 1918. It was shown in a Klimt retrospective in Vienna in 1925. Then it disappeared from public view until Im Kinsky offered it for sale. No one has claimed possession of it, says the complaint, so there is no evidence the Lieser family ever willingly gave anyone else possession of it.
Gustav Klimt’s Dame mit Faecher (Lady with a Fan), 1917–18.
Courtesy Sotheby’s
Adolf Lieser died in 1919. His wife Silvia had her US citizenship restored in 1938 and died in Hungary that same year. Margarethe married Baron Henrik Gutmann de Gelse et Beliscse in 1921; that year they had a child, William de Gelsey. All three survived the Holocaust and moved to the UK. De Gelsey always claimed the painting depicted his mother, and hung a study in his London home. He tried in vain to find the painting until he died without heirs in 2021.
Margarethe’s brother Hans married Edith Anna Lieser before the Holocaust and had a son, Nickolas, born in Vienna in 1938. He grew up as Nickolas Kraft, taking the surname of Edith’s second husband. Hans died in 1978, estranged from Edith and Nickolas. Under Austrian law, Nickolas qualifies as an heir.
Hans remarried after the Holocaust. He and his second wife, Margarete Knotek Lieser, had no children. She died in Vienna in 1995. He moved to the US and died in Florida in 2023. Leahy is his daughter.
When the painting came to auction, it garnered international news coverage. The house said that a family in Austria had acquired it in the early 1960s, without elaborating on how they came to be in possession of it. Ropper apparently bought it in 2022 and consigned it to Kinsky. Having done “fresh research,” the house claimed it could be a depiction of one of Margarethe Lieser’s cousins, Helene or Annie. The complaint says there is no evidence that either of them ever claimed to be the subject.
The house never consulted the foremost experts on Klimt, says the complaint, and acknowledged that “the identity of Klimt’s sitter is not completely certain.” A footnote in the auction catalogue noted that the house had “not been able to clarify the precise provenance of the painting following the exhibition at the Neue Galerie in 1925.” It acknowledged that the painting’s “partially unexplained history” could leave it subject to restitution claims. The house even “acknowledged that it believed that it was unlikely that the painting had left the Lieser family’s possession prior to the Anschluss,” says the filing.
There’s a reason the seller went to Austria to sell a work by one of the best-selling artists in the world, rather than Christie’s or Sotheby’s, says the complaint: “Larger auction houses, such as Christie’s and Sotheby’s,” it reads, “have well-known guidelines concerning potentially looted art. Notably, Austria’s laws concerning restitution of Nazi looted art are not as stringent as those of other jurisdictions.”
When Leahy contested the sale, she was told that Ropper required all potential heirs to act through one lawyer. Even after presenting evidence she was the sole heir, she was rebuffed, she says, and warned not to make any public statements or approach the press, or they would hold her responsible for any damage to the work’s value.
“Defendants’ representation that the restitution process was properly and comprehensively resolved was thus knowingly false,” says the complaint.
