Rediscovered Klimt sparks dispute

Lost portrait of African prince found in Vienna, sparks ownership battle with Hungary

VIENNA:

A long-lost Gustav Klimt portrait of an African prince, missing for more than 80 years, has resurfaced in Vienna — only to become entangled in a cross-border dispute between Austria and Hungary over its rightful ownership.

The story began in the summer of 2023, when a man walked into a Viennese gallery hoping to sell a Klimt painting. Initially, the staff member who greeted him assumed it was a joke and politely turned him away.

But when the owner of the W&K gallery heard what had happened, he rushed down the street to find the man. Ebi Kohlbacher, an expert on the great Austrian symbolist painter, knew several Klimt works were still unaccounted for.

When he caught up with the visitor, the man showed him a photograph of a painting believed lost for eight decades — a portrait of Prince William Nii Nortey Dowuona, an African aristocrat known to have met Klimt and posed for him.

"It is one of the rare paintings of a black person in European art created by a great artist," Kohlbacher told AFP. Experts say Dowuona was the head of a group of the Ga people from near Accra in Ghana who were part of a controversial "human zoo" exhibition that depicted African village life and drew huge crowds in Vienna in 1897.

The painting disappeared after World War II. It had belonged to a wealthy Jewish Austrian family, the Kleins. "We had to determine where the work came from without a trace of doubt," Kohlbacher said. Another expert, Alfred Weidinger, helped confirm the portrait's authenticity.

The Kleins, who were wine dealers, acquired the piece after Klimt's death in 1918. They fled Austria after the Nazi annexation in 1938, entrusting the painting to a woman, who later moved to Hungary.

But when the communists took power in Budapest in 1949, she ignored repeated pleas from the family to return it, and the painting vanished from public view. It resurfaced decades later, passing through four owners in Hungary between 1988 and 2023, before being brought back to Austria for expert analysis once Hungarian authorities granted an export licence.

Klimt's works now fetch extraordinary sums - his 'Lady with a Fan' sold for $108 million in 2023 - and Weidinger hailed this rediscovered portrait as one of the artist's "prominent" works. The oil painting's floral motifs, later a hallmark of Klimt's style, reveal "a key phase in the evolution of his artistic language," he said.

"This transition phase is defined in particular by the tension between the meticulously detailed and naturalist figure of the prince and the vibrant, almost expressionist rendering of the background," Weidinger added.

Kohlbacher believes Klimt admired the prince. "It is obvious that the painting radiates his admiration," he said.

Prince Dowuona led a delegation of 120 Africans who travelled through the Austro-Hungarian Empire and posed for six months in a show that drew up to 10,000 visitors a day. The portrait, Weidinger said, marked a turning point in European perceptions of Africans.

Despite the exhibition's colonial overtones and voyeurism, the Africans "were no longer separated from the public," Weidinger noted. "The Viennese bourgeoisie took them to cafés and shopping, and showed them local monuments."

The painting's reappearance has now taken on a political dimension. The current owner is permitted to sell it under an agreement based on the 1998 Washington Principles governing the restitution of property seized from Holocaust victims. He has reportedly reached a confidential deal with descendants of Ernestine Klein, the original owner who died in 1973.

But Hungary disputes the legality of the export licence, arguing that a work of such significance should never have left the country. The W&K gallery hopes Budapest will honour international restitution standards, but a Vienna prosecutor confirmed to AFP that he has received a seizure order from Hungary - which wants the so-called "Black Klimt" returned.