Christie’s to auction Klimt landscape for up to $80M

Gustav Klimt's lakeside landscape Litzlbergkeller (1915–16) will headline Christie's 20th Century Evening Sale in New York on November 17, with an estimate of $60 million to $80 million, the auction house announced Monday. The painting has been in one private collection for nearly three decades. It is guaranteed to sell, Christie's confirmed to ARTnews. A sale within the estimate would put it among the Austrian artist's highest prices at public auction.press.christies.com+1

From Record to Return

The family of the current owner, who has not been named, paid $14.7 million for the canvas at Sotheby's New York in May 1997, then a record for Klimt. At the time it was titled Litzlbergkeller am Attersee, and the price equals roughly $30.9 million after inflation, ARTnews reported. That 1997 sale came from the estate of Serge Sabarsky, co-founder of New York's Neue Galerie. Christie's noted that its November sale will take place just days after the museum's reopening.artnews.com+1

The market for Klimt has risen sharply since 1997. His current auction record is $236.4 million, paid for Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer at Sotheby's last November. His most expensive landscape so far is Birch Forest (1903), which sold for $104.5 million at Christie's in 2022, according to Artforum.artforum.com

A Commission From Lake Attersee

The work shows the Litzlberg Cellar, a brewery and inn on the north shore of Lake Attersee where Klimt stayed during his summers from 1900 to 1907. He painted it about a decade later from the opposite shore, working from a telescope and postcard images. He started in summer 1915 and finished in his Vienna studio in May 1916, Christie's said. Most of Klimt's landscapes were personal projects, but this one was also commissioned, by the banker and patron Otto Primavesi. It later belonged to the photographer Hugo Bernatzik and to Kurt Wieser before reaching Sabarsky. In recent years it has been on long-term loan to Vienna's Leopold Museum.press.christies.com

Viewing Schedule

The painting will be on view at Christie's Hong Kong from October 27 to 29, then at Rockefeller Center starting November 7, according to the auction house.press.christies.com

Max Carter, Christie's global chairman of 20th and 21st century art, said the inn "sits at the water's edge, between Klimt's allover technique and abstraction, form and dissolution, prewar certainties and the unknown." Asked about the house's confidence in the estimate, Carter told Artnet News, as quoted by Artforum, that "very few paintings, let alone Klimts, have its magic."artforum.com