Christie's estimates Klimt's Litzlbergkeller at $60m to $80m for 17 November sale

The public view at Christie's Rockefeller Center galleries opens on 7 November, ten days before the sale. Christie's planned a Hong Kong viewing from 27 to 29 October before the Rockefeller Center public view opens on 7 November. The painting has been in the same private collection for nearly 30 years. The work is an oil on canvas measuring about 110.5 by 110.5 centimetres, or 43.5 inches square.

Market context

The $60m to $80m estimate compares with $14.7m at the painting's last auction, in May 1997. According to Turkiye Today, the work sold at Sotheby's in New York in May 1997 for $14.7m in the estate sale of Serge Sabarsky, co-founder of the Neue Galerie, setting a world auction record for Klimt. The same report put the artist's current record at $236.4m, set by Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer at Sotheby's in November 2025, and said Birch Forest sold for $104.5m at Christie's in 2022. The 17 November sale is the painting's first return to auction since 1997.

Max Carter, Christie's global chairman of 20th and 21st century art, said the evening sale was created six years ago to reflect collectors' range across categories.

Commission and subject

Litzlbergkeller is a rare hybrid in Klimt's output, both a personal experiment and a commission. Otto Primavesi, a banker and entrepreneur from Olmütz, and his wife Eugenia were among Klimt's most important patrons, having commissioned two family portraits in 1912. Klimt began the painting in the summer of 1915 and finished it in May 1916 in his Vienna studio.

The subject is the Litzlberg Cellar, a brewery and inn on the north shore of Lake Attersee. Klimt had stayed there during his first summers in the region, between 1900 and 1907. By the time he painted it he was living in a cottage on the south shore, and he composed the view from across the water with a telescope and postcard images. He removed the inn's summer crowds and every figure, leaving a still view of green planes and water.

Klimt spent most summers at Attersee from 1900 until his death in 1918.

Giovanna Bertazzoni, chairman of Christie's Europe, described the picture as 'a lyrical composition in three stanze' and called the work inestimable.

Provenance

After Primavesi, the painting passed to the Austrian photographer and anthropologist Hugo Bernatzik. Kurt Wieser acquired it in the early 1930s, and it later entered the collection of Serge Sabarsky. Sabarsky curated the first Klimt exhibition in Japan in 1981 and later co-founded the Neue Galerie. The present owner's family bought the work at his estate sale in May 1997.

The Leopold Museum in Vienna has held the work on long-term loan in recent years. Christie's said the sale falls days after the Neue Galerie reopens.