A Gustav Klimt painting that once belonged to an art collector credited with popularizing the artist and other Austrian modernists in the US is expected to sell for around $45million when it debuts at auction next month at Sotheby’s New York.
Klimt painted Insel im Attersee (1901-02) in the Salzkammergut region of Austria, and focused most of the landscape composition on the water of Attersee, a lake the artist often visited with friends in the summer. Klimt’s use of color, light and texture to create a kaleidoscopic effect on the surface of water shows an essential connection to the artist’s so-called “golden period” when he created several of his most famous works, according to Sotheby’s.
The painting once belonged to the art historian and collector Otto Kallir, which helped bring artists like Klimt and other Austrian modernists to the world’s attention after World War II. After fleeing Austria in 1938 after the Nazis invaded the country, Kallir moved to the United States, where he opened Galerie St. Etienne in New York. It was there that Kallir held Klimt’s first solo exhibition in the United States in 1959, and Insel im Attersee was one of Klimt’s first paintings exhibited in space in 1940, according to Sotheby’s. Only one other version of the painting exists and is kept in the collection of the Leopold Museum in Vienna.
Although American audiences did not immediately embrace artists like Klimt and Egon Schiele, Klimt’s work is hugely popular today, including in museums and at auction. Last year his painting birch forest (1903) set a new record when he sold for $104.5 million (with fee) at the sale of the art collection of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen at Christie’s New York.
Kallier also contributed to placing Klimt’s work in major American institutions: in 1957, Kallir provided the Museum of Modern Art in New York with his first work by the artist, The park (1910), and also donated Pear tree (1903) at Harvard University’s Fogg Museum in 1956.
The Saint-Etienne Gallery farm its commercial space in 2021, and the gallery’s archives are now managed by the nonprofit Kallir Research Institute, run by Kallier’s granddaughter, Jane Kallir. In 2002, on behalf of the owner, Jane took the loan from Insel im Attersee fof an exhibition at the Oesterreichische Galerie Belvedere in Vienna after the museum refused to loan further Klimt paintings to a Massachusetts museum over fears the paintings would be seized by US authorities. At the time, a Los Angeles court agreed to hear arguments in favor of Klimt’s restitution Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1903-07), which was stolen by the Nazis and ended up in the collection of the Vienna Museum (the court then ordered the painting to restore to the heirs of the model of the portrait).
Insel im Attersee, which will be part of the Sotheby’s Modern evening sale on May 16, is among the most valuable works to be auctioned next month in New York. Two paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat are estimated to sell for $45 million at Christie’s and $30 million at Sotheby’s, respectively, and by Ed Ruscha Burning standard is estimated between 20 and 30 million dollars at Christie’s, and Portrait of a man as the god Mars (circa 1620) by Peter Paul Rubens could sell for up to $30 million at Sotheby’s.
