A portrait of a stately West African leader painted by famed Austrian artist Gustav Klimt has reappeared in public after being lost before World War II.
Nearly a hundred years have passed since it was last seen, and is now exhibited at Wienerroither & Kohlbacher Gallery in Vienna, with a price tag of €15 million.
The portrait of Prince William Nii Nortey Dowuona—a representative of the Ga people in West Africa, comprising parts of modern-day Ghana, was painted by Klimt in 1897, sold by the artist’s estate in 1923, and lost by 1938.
An art historian who had been searching for the work for 2 decades verified its authenticity for W&K Galleries with the help of a well-faded stamp on the back of the canvas. A wealthy Austrian Jewish family who had converted Klimt’s studio into a villa acquired the painting in 1928 for an exhibition.
That was the last time and place it was seen, for by 1938, the Klein family had abandoned their property and fled the growing anti-semitism in their homeland to Monaco.
“The composition and painterly execution point to Klimt’s turn towards decorative elements, which were to characterize his later work, and are directly linked to his pioneering portraits of the following years,” said Alfred Weidinger, who authenticated the work, in press materials.
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Prince Dowuona traveled to Vienna for a late-colonial sing-and-dance called the Völkerschau which exhibited ethnographic displays from colonized people around the world at an urban zoo. This is where a friend of Klimt’s first found the stately African leader, who was one of 120 Ga people who traveled via steamship to Austria for the Völkerschau, according to Art Net.
It’s believed that both Klimt and his friend Matsch painted Dowuona, but being that this work remained unsigned and in Europe, the client, whoever it was, probably selected the one painted by Matsch.
Klimt’s corpus includes many that have fetched 8-figure sums at auction houses, and one that sold for $108 million of an unknown woman holding a fan. There is currently no plan to auction this work.
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