The consignor of Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Fräulein Lieser (1917), whose €30m sale at the Vienna auction house Im Kinsky in 2024 was later cancelled because of disputes over its tangled provenance, now faces yet another hurdle to selling the painting in the form of a lawsuit filed in the United States that could keep it off the market for years to come. This latest dispute centres around a bitter 1942 divorce and a betrayal whose repercussions have reverberated across generations and continents.
The identity of the young woman portrayed in the portrait has long been a puzzle and the subject of debate. It is also key to determining which members of a Jewish family owned it before it was lost during the Nazi era.
Little is known about the portrait’s provenance. What is known is that it was still in Klimt’s studio at the time of his death in 1918 and is not quite finished. The name of the person who commissioned the portrait from Klimt was documented only as Lieser, a family of important industrialists in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The authors of the Klimt catalogue raisonné believe it was commissioned by Adolf Lieser and portrayed his daughter, Margarethe. Im Kinsky, however, said at the time of the 2024 auction that there were indications it was instead commissioned by Henriette Lieser-Landau, the ex-wife of Justus Lieser, Adolf’s brother, and portrays one of her two daughters. Lieser-Landau was deported in 1942 and murdered by the Nazis in 1943.
Heirs of both Adolf Lieser and Henriette Lieser-Landau were included in a potential settlement that would have divided the revenue of the sale between the claimants and the current holder of the painting, Eva Ropper. According to correspondence between lawyers representing claimants recently obtained by The Art Newspaper, 60% of the revenue was to go to the claimants, and 40% to Ropper.
At the April 2024 auction, the advisory Patti Wong & Associates bid €30m on behalf of an anonymous Hong Kong buyer. While this was at the low end of Im Kinsky’s estimate, it was the highest price ever bid at an auction in Austria. But the sale fell through when another claimant emerged: Patricia Leahy, the granddaughter of Hans Lieser, who was Margarethe’s brother. Her lawyer filed a complaint in April in the Supreme Court of the State of New York against Im Kinsky and Ropper.
The lawsuit alleges that the Hong Kong buyer “sought indemnification from all potential claimants”, including Leahy. The claimants all “signed agreements disclaiming further claims in exchange for payment” except for Leahy, who was not included in the original settlement, according to the complaint. When attempts to negotiate an agreement with Leahy failed, the Hong Kong buyer withdrew, it says.
Leahy’s suit requests a declaratory judgment that “the plaintiff is a rightful heir and a rightful owner of Portrait of Fräulein Lieser”. It urges Im Kinsky and Ropper to “immediately deliver Portrait of Fräulein Lieser to plaintiff”.
By mid-October, six months after the complaint was announced and widely distributed to news media, it had not yet been served on Ropper, according to her lawyer in Vienna, Robert Bachner. “It appears that the plaintiff has so far taken no steps to do so,” he said. “From Ms Ropper’s perspective, the complaint is without justification. The background to the complaint appears to be primarily a dispute between the Kraft Estate/Patricia Leahy and Hannes Staal, the sole legal successor to Hans Lieser.”
The Austrian newspaper Der Standard reported in June that Ropper has also commissioned a more detailed provenance report in an attempt to uncover which part of the family owned the painting.
The reason Leahy was not included in the original settlement is that, despite being Hans Lieser’s granddaughter, she is not—according to the lawyer for another claimant, Hannes Viktor Staal—his rightful heir. Hans Lieser’s 1968 will, a copy of which was made available to The Art Newspaper, states that his sole heir is his second wife, Margareta Lieser.
Some dark family history explains why Leahy’s claim is disputed by the other claimants. Hans Lieser married his first wife, Edith Böhm, in 1934. She was not Jewish. Their son, Nikolaus, was born in Vienna in June 1938, three months after Adolf Hitler’s annexation of Austria.
According to a court affidavit written by Hans Lieser and dated 23 January 1947, members of the Lieser family had entrusted Edith with their company and with shares to protect their assets from “Aryanisation” by the Nazis. Hans and Edith Lieser moved to Budapest in September 1938.
Hans Lieser’s affidavit states that his initially harmonious marriage soured when Edith began an “intimate relationship” with a Gestapo and SS officer, Tibor Collas. In the affidavit, Lieser wrote that Edith, who was often in Vienna as the nominal manager of the company business, ended up moving there permanently with their son Nikolaus in 1939 and “from that point onward regarded the company as her own property”.
Not only that, but according to the affidavit and to a Hungarian newspaper article from 1946, Collas used his Nazi connections to pursue Hans Lieser, who was arrested and deported to Slovakia.
The Liesers’ marriage was dissolved in 1942 and Lieser was once again arrested on the basis of a complaint filed by Collas, he wrote. Edith established a new company and transferred to it the assets and rights of the original family-owned company. In November 1945, after the end of the war, Hans Lieser filed a police complaint and, in the affidavit, estimated that Edith had appropriated more than 1m Reichsmarks from the Liesers—the equivalent of several million dollars today.
Edith married a US army colonel, James Kraft, and moved to the US after the war with Nikolaus, who adopted his stepfather’s name—the recent US complaint identifies him as Nickolas Johann Kraft. Nickolas Kraft had little contact with his biological father but sued him in 1967, before his marriage, for payment of a dowry, according to documents made available to The Art Newspaper. Under Austrian law, parents are, under certain circumstances, obliged to give a settlement to their children on marriage. The draft of a letter Hans Lieser wrote to Kraft shows that he responded with outrage.
When Lieser died in 1978, his widow Margareta inherited his estate. Lieser’s will states that Nickolas Kraft should only receive the “compulsory share” of his estate because he “gravely violated his duties towards me as a son, making contact with me only when he expected to gain financially”. Under Austrian law, even disinherited children are entitled to a share of the inheritance, which Kraft duly received.
As she had no children, Margareta left the estate to her sister, who, in turn, bequeathed it to her son, Hannes Staal. According to his lawyer, Louis Rönsberg, Staal says he remembers Hans Lieser and had a good relationship with his uncle. Rönsberg says his client is the only rightful heir to Hans Lieser’s 15% share of the revenue of Portrait of Fräulein Lieser—when and if it is eventually sold.
While disinherited children are entitled to a share of the estate under Austrian law, they do not qualify as heirs and must claim their share from the beneficiary of the will.According to a 2024 letter from Leahy’s Austrian lawyer to Rönsberg that was made available to The Art Newspaper, that share in this case is 37.5%. Rönsberg, however, argued in his response to the lawyer that Leahy’s claim has by now expired due to statutes of limitation.
After the failed 2024 auction at Im Kinsky, the consignor and claimants included in the original settlement agreed that the next attempt to sell would be at a major international auction house. But as long as the threat of a US court case against Im Kinsky and Ropper is pending, “a sale is impossible,” Rönsberg says. “Ms. Leahy and her lawyer are blocking everything. The case is not advancing and they are not helping to find a solution.”
Leahy’s New York-based lawyer, Oren Warshavsky, did not respond to repeated requests for comment. A spokeswoman for Im Kinsky declined to comment on Leahy’s suit, saying only that the auction house is no longer in possession of the picture and no longer has a relationship with the consignor.
Following the auction and the failure to reach an agreement, “Ms Leahy has apparently now decided to use the complaint, together with the accompanying PR campaign, to exert pressure”, says Bachner, Ropper’s lawyer. Her failure to advance the suit, he adds, “reinforces the impression that the plaintiff’s primary objective was to achieve the greatest possible publicity with minimal effort”.