Stolen Klimt Landscape Fetches $40.4 Million at Sotheby’s Sale

A Gustav Klimt landscape stolen by the Nazis from its Jewish owner and recently returned to the woman’s grandson sold for $40.4 million at Sotheby’s today.

The top lot in the auction house’s Impressionist and modern art evening sale, it went to a Zurich dealer named David Lachenmann after protracted bidding that boiled down to him and someone on the phone.

The price easily topped the presale high estimate of $25 million. Lachenmann said he bought the painting for a client he declined to identify. The current record for a Klimt landscape is 26.9 million pounds ($43.4 million at the time of Sotheby’s London sale in February 2010).

“Litzlberg am Attersee” (1915) depicts verdant hills above the lake of the title in western Austria. This summer, the Museum of Modern Art in Salzburg, Austria, returned the work to Georges Jorisch, the grandson of Amalie Redlich, a Jewish woman who owned it until she was deported to Lodz, a Polish town with a large Jewish ghetto, and never heard from again. The Gestapo sold off her art collection.

Sotheby’s auction, which is continuing, is expected to tally $168 million to $230 million. The estimates were lowered after a Matisse bronze was withdrawn.

Estimated at $20 million to $30 million, the work was part of a quartet consigned by the Burnett Foundation in Fort Worth, Texas. All four sold privately yesterday, with Sotheby’s brokering the deal. The auction house declined to disclose the identity of the buyer or the purchase prices.