A major work by a market titan will go under the hammer at Christie’s New York next moth. Gustav Klimt’s landscape Litzlbergkeller (1915–1916) is estimated at $60–80 million, which, if achieved, would put it among the Austrian artist’s top prices at public sale. The piece is guaranteed to sell, the house confirmed to ARTnews. It has been in the same private collection for nearly three decades; the seller is unnamed. It goes to auction at the house’s marquee November 17 evening sale of 20th- and 21st-century art.
The painting set a record for Klimt when the family of the current owner paid $14.7 million for it at Sotheby’s New York in May 1997 (at that time, it was listed under the title Litzlbergkeller am Attersee, by which it has also been known); adjusted for inflation, that’s about $30.9 million. At that sale, it came from the estate of Serge Sabarasky, a cofounder of New York’s Neue Galerie, just a few subway stops north of Christie’s Rockefeller Center saleroom, where the work will be offered after a quick jaunt (October 27–29) to the auctioneer’s Hong Kong showroom. (As it happens, the Neue Galerie, home to some major Klimt works, reopens November 12 after a construction project.)
“The inn of Litzlbergkeller sits at the water’s edge, between Klimt’s allover technique and abstraction, form and dissolution, prewar certainties and the unknown,” said Max Carter, global chairman of 20th and 21st-century art, in press materials.
Klimt’s auction record stands at $236.4 million, paid at Sotheby’s New York in November 2025 for his Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer (1914−16). Six of the Austrian’s top 10 prices at auction were fetched by landscapes; seven of his top 10 prices were notched in 2022 or after, helping to fuel a patchy art-market recovery weighted toward the top end, leading ARTnews to title its new Top 200 Collectors issue “The Year of the Trophy.”
From 1900 until his death in 1918, Klimt often spent his summers in the Austrian countryside on the shores of Lake Attersee, pictured in the canvas on offer. “It was during his summers in Litzlberg, on the shores of Lake Attersee, that the artist developed his profound connection with the natural world,” wrote Sarah Belmont for ARTnews in reviewing his top prices, some of which were for landscapes painted there.
The canvas on offer presents a view focused on the Litzlberg Cellar, a brewery and inn on the north shore where Klimt stayed during his first several summers in the area, but actually dates from a decade after his move to a cottage on the lake’s southern shore. The artist partly based the composition on his own study via a telescope from the opposite shore and partly on postcard views, Christie’s points out.
“This landscape reads like a lyrical composition in three stanze—the forest with majestic, whispering oak trees; the house embraced by their foliage; the shimmering reflection in the lake,” said Giovanna Bertazzoni, chairman of Christie’s Europe, in a press release, calling the work “inestimable.”
The piece was commissioned by banker and entrepreneur Otto Primavesi, who, with his wife Eugenia, was a major patron of the arts and commissioned Klimt to paint two family portraits in 1912. It went by 1927 to Austrian photographer and anthropologist Hugo Bernatzik; then to Vienna collector Kurt Wieser, who owned it from the ‘30s until at least 1958; and from there to Sabarsky, a major promoter of Klimt’s work.
In its long life, it has hung on the walls of museums and institutions such as Secession Vienna; the Künstlerhaus in Vienna; the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts in Brussels; Palazzo Strozzi in Venice; Kunsthaus Zürich; and the Leopold Museum in Vienna.
Christie’s announcement of the Klimt consignment comes just days after the same house announced another work with an $80 million high estimate: a Wassily Kandinsky abstraction that is guaranteed to exceed the Russian-born artist’s current high. Also in October, the house announced a $100 million group of works from a “distinguished collector” that is reported to be the famed artist Jeff Koons.
The auctioneer’s main competitor, Sotheby’s, has not been without major consignments for next month. It will offer $450 million in works from the Blaquier family, led by a major Vincent van Gogh; a $100 million collection of works from the estate of Ted and Ruth Baum, led by paintings by Mark Rothko and Ed Ruscha; and a dozen works from bankrupt Miami hedge funder George Allen Weiss.