Gustav Klimt's Litzlbergkeller is guaranteed to sell at Christie's, $60–80 million

Gustav Klimt's landscape Litzlbergkeller (1915–1916) will go under the hammer at Christie's New York next month, where the house has set an estimate of $60–80 million. The work carries a guarantee, so it will sell regardless of where bidding lands.

The canvas appears in the marquee November 17 evening sale of 20th- and 21st-century art at Christie's Rockefeller Center saleroom. If it reaches the top of its estimate, it would enter the Austrian artist's highest public-sale prices.

The seller is unnamed and has held the painting in the same private collection for nearly three decades. The family of the current owner bought it at Sotheby's New York in May 1997 for $14.7 million, then a record for Klimt at auction.

Adjusted for inflation, that 1997 price is roughly $30.9 million. At the earlier sale the work was listed as Litzlbergkeller am Attersee, the alternate title under which it has also been known, and it came from the estate of Serge Sabarsky.

Sabarsky was a cofounder of New York's Neue Galerie, a museum that is home to several major Klimt works and is a few subway stops north of the saleroom. The Neue Galerie reopens November 12 after a construction project.

The inn and the lake behind it

The picture shows the Litzlberg Cellar, a brewery and inn on the north shore of Lake Attersee where Klimt stayed during his first summers in the region. It dates from a decade after he moved to a cottage on the lake's southern shore.

The artist built the composition partly from his own study made through a telescope from the opposite shore, and partly from postcard views, Christie's notes. From 1900 until his death in 1918, Klimt often spent his summers on the lake's shores.

Max Carter, global chairman of 20th and 21st-century art, framed the subject in press materials. He described the inn at the water's edge, between Klimt's allover technique and abstraction, form and dissolution, and prewar certainties and the unknown.

Giovanna Bertazzoni, chairman of Christie's Europe, called the work inestimable. She read it as a lyrical composition in three stanze: whispering oak trees in the forest, the house embraced by their foliage, and the shimmering reflection in the lake.

A century of owners and exhibitions

Banker and entrepreneur Otto Primavesi commissioned the painting. He and his wife Eugenia were major patrons of the arts, and in 1912 they had Klimt paint two family portraits. By 1927 the landscape had passed to Austrian photographer and anthropologist Hugo Bernatzik.

It then went to Vienna collector Kurt Wieser, who owned it from the 1930s until at least 1958, and afterward to Sabarsky, a major promoter of Klimt's work. Along the way it has hung in institutions including Secession Vienna and the Künstlerhaus in Vienna.

Other walls it has hung on include the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, Palazzo Strozzi in Venice, Kunsthaus Zürich and the Leopold Museum in Vienna. Before the New York sale it makes a brief trip to Christie's Hong Kong showroom from October 27 to 29.

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 auction prices were fetched by landscapes, and seven of his top 10 were set in 2022 or later.

We covered that Lederer result in our look at the most expensive paintings ever sold, where it is the highest price ever paid for modern art at auction and second among artworks of any kind, behind the $450.3 million Salvator Mundi.

The Klimt consignment arrives days after Christie's announced another work with an $80 million high estimate: a Wassily Kandinsky abstraction guaranteed to beat the Russian-born artist's current high. The house also announced a $100 million group of works reported to come from Jeff Koons.

Sotheby's has not lacked major November consignments either. It will offer $450 million in works from the Blaquier family led by a Vincent van Gogh, a $100 million collection 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.

Landscapes are a strong thread in Klimt's market, a trend Sarah Belmont of ARTnews traced to his summers in Litzlberg. ARTnews titled its new Top 200 Collectors issue The Year of the Trophy, describing a patchy art-market recovery weighted toward the top end.