Klimt’s Lakeside Masterpiece Could Fetch Up to $80 Million at Christie’s

Image: Collected

A major Gustav Klimt landscape is set to become one of the art market’s biggest autumn attractions, with Christie’s estimating it at $60 million to $80 million in New York next month.

A Rare Return to Auction

Christie’s will offer Litzlbergkeller (1915–16), a shimmering view of Lake Attersee, as the headline lot of its 20th Century Evening Sale on November 17. The oil-on-canvas work measures 43.5 by 43.5 inches and has remained in the same private collection for nearly three decades.

The painting carries a guaranteed sale, meaning a buyer is secured regardless of the auction outcome. If it reaches its upper estimate, it would rank among the most expensive Klimt works ever sold at public auction.

From Record Price to Major Re-Test

The family of the unnamed current owner bought the canvas for $14.7 million at Sotheby’s New York in May 1997, when it set an auction record for Klimt. Adjusted for inflation, that price is roughly $30.9 million today.

The work had previously belonged to Serge Sabarsky, co-founder of New York’s Neue Galerie, before entering the private collection. Christie’s scheduled the sale just days after the museum’s planned reopening.

Klimt’s Vision of Attersee

Litzlbergkeller depicts the Litzlberg Cellar, a brewery and inn on the northern shore of Lake Attersee, where Klimt spent summers between 1900 and 1907. He painted the scene around a decade later, working from the opposite shore with the aid of a telescope and postcard images.

Klimt began the painting in the summer of 1915 and completed it in his Vienna studio in May 1916. Unlike many of his landscapes, it was also commissioned by the banker and patron Otto Primavesi.

Why the Market Is Watching

Klimt’s market has climbed dramatically since the 1997 sale. His auction record now stands at $236.4 million, set by Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer at Sotheby’s last November, while his landscape record is $104.5 million for Birch Forest at Christie’s in 2022.

Christie’s will display the painting in Hong Kong from October 27 to 29 before moving it to Rockefeller Center beginning November 7.

Max Carter, Christie’s global chairman of 20th and 21st century art, described the inn as sitting “between Klimt’s allover technique and abstraction, form and dissolution, prewar certainties and the unknown.”