Why Gustav Klimt’s ‘Insel Im Attersee’ Auctioning At Sotheby’s Could Sell For More Than $100 Million

On May 16th, Sotheby’s will celebrate spring with the auction of Insel im Attersee (Island in the Attersee) in New York by Gustav Klimt (1862-1918). With a low estimate of $45 million, the beautifully dappled landscape features Austria’s stunning lake region, a favorite of artist Gustav Klimt’s during summer holidays. Paintings of the same subject matter include one from 1900 and one from 1902, playing with color and stroke to express the shifting ripples of the water.

Sotheby’s literature explains that Klimt and his muse, textile designer Emilie Flöge, joined Flöge family friends and relatives on Attersee’s south shore in Weissenbach in the summers in idyllic isolation from the outside world (or even local people) for nearly 15 years from 1900-1914. That makes this painting an early impression by the artist, when he would have been experiencing the wonder of the water for the first time.

Klimt also drew inspiration from the forrester’s house in which he stayed with Forsthaus in Weissenbach am Attersee in collection of the Neue Galerie in New York and Landhaus am Attersee, at the Belvedere Museum in Austria.

Another major work from these idyllic sojourns is Litzlberg am Attersee, an adaptation of the region named for a humble local castle Litzlberg that rested elegantly along the water’s edge.

Klimt’s trademark style became one of the major signatures of Vienna’s Secessionist movement, and ultimately, he grew to become one of the most famous artists of all time. In 2011, Klimt’s Litzlberg am Attersee sold for $40.4 million at Sotheby’s New York. Last year, The Art Newspaper reports that, “Birch Forest (1903) set a new record when it sold for $104.5m (with fees) during the sale of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s art collection at Christie’s New York.”

Klimt valuations skyrocketed in the wake of the Woman in Gold (Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer I) controversy of the early 2000s, when the portrait of Jewish Viennese muse Adele Bloch-Bauer was returned to its rightful heir, Maria Altmann, after being seized by Nazis during World War II and displayed at the Belvedere. Altmann sold the painting to the Neue Galerie for $135 million in 2006, making it one of the most expensive paintings of all time.

Today, valuations for Klimt paintings are regularly over $100 million for portraiture. The second portrait depicting Adele Bloch-Bauer was sold to Oprah Winfrey for $87.9 million in 2006, then resold to a Chinese collector, in 2017, for $150 million. The painting was displayed at the Neue Galerie, in New York, from 2016 to 2018, but reemerged in a show at the Van Gogh Museum in 2023 under the name HomeArt, an advisory firm run by Hong Kong powerhouse Rosaline Wong. HomeArt HK Limited was registered in the Virgin Islands in November 2015.

At the same Amsterdam showcase, HomeArt was also credited under Wasserschlangen II (Water Serpents II), previously bought by Swiss art magnate Yves Bouvier in 2013, from “the daughter of a Qatari Emir” for $112 million, then sold to the Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev—the owner, for a time, of Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi—for $183 million. Rybolovlev later sold the painting “to Asia,” according to a statement in Bloomberg.

Although landscapes are not priced quite as high historically, the combination of the HomeArt showcase with the current cultural moment of climate change activism has recharged the global gaze on Gustav Klimt artworks. In November 2022, the Gustav Klimt painting Death and Life was the subject of a climate protest by Austrian-based activists from Letzte Generation at the Leopold Museum, and in March, a response exhibition was scaled with On Lake Attersee by Gustav Klimt from 1900 turned helter-skelter to show the drastic effects of subtle temperature shifts.

As such, the choice to auction a work from the private market, advertised as the only one in private hands, came at an opportune time. This Attersee painting has a thorough provenance from Otto Kallir, owner of the New York Galerie St. Etienne, and appears to be without controversy. But more importantly, the choice of a landscape in an uncertain climate is a powerful one.

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