Klimt's Litzlbergkeller: An Attersee Inn Returns to Auction at $60M to $80M
Litzlbergkeller (1915-1916), Klimt's square view of a lakeside inn once owned by Serge Sabarsky, leads Christie's 20th Century Evening Sale on November 17 with a $60M to $80M estimate.
Gustav Klimt's Litzlbergkeller (1915-1916) looks across Lake Attersee at a white inn sunk in green. Oil on a square canvas, 110.5 by 110.5 cm, it flattens house, forest and reflection into a single woven surface. Klimt had spent eight summers at that brewery and inn with the Flöge family from 1900; fifteen years later, working from the opposite shore with a telescope and opera glasses, he cut the dock and stairs, emptied the scene of people, and finished the painting in Vienna by May 1916.
The work was commissioned by banker Otto Primavesi, a close patron, and entered a collection that also held Hope II and the portrait of Mäda Primavesi. It later passed through Hugo Bernatzik and Kurt and Christine Wieser before reaching Serge Sabarsky, co-founder of New York's Neue Galerie. At Sabarsky's estate sale at Sotheby's New York on May 13, 1997, it set a then-world auction record for Klimt at about $14.7 million. The buyer's family has held it since; from 2018 to 2025 it hung on long-term loan at Vienna's Leopold Museum.
On November 17, 2026, Litzlbergkeller leads Christie's 20th Century Evening Sale in New York with an estimate of $60 million to $80 million and a third-party guarantee. Five days earlier, Neue Galerie reopens for its 25th anniversary. The lake view that Klimt turned into memory now returns to auction a few blocks from the museum Sabarsky helped invent.
Sources
- Gustav Klimt, Litzlbergkeller, Christie's lot
- The story of Gustav Klimt's Litzlbergkeller, Christie's
- Masterpiece Klimt Landscape Headlining Christie's 20th Century Evening Sale, Christie's press
- Klimt Landscape That Once Made Auction History Could Net $80M at Christie's, Artnet
- Thumbnail: Litzlbergkeller, Christie's