Portrait of Fräulein Lieser

Painted in 1917, the year before Klimt's death from a stroke following the Spanish flu, Portrait of Fräulein Lieser belongs to his final creative phase — a period when he was simultaneously experimenting with looser brushwork influenced by younger Viennese artists like Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka while retaining the ornamental complexity that defined his mature style. The sitter's identity was long uncertain; documentary research has linked her to the Lieser family, prominent Viennese Jewish industrialists who were among the most significant patrons of Secession-era art. The work disappeared after the Second World War and resurfaced in private hands in the 2020s, raising complex restitution questions that underscore how deeply Klimt's patronage network was bound up with Vienna's Jewish bourgeoisie. By 1917 the Vienna Secession, which Klimt had co-founded in 1897, had long since dissolved its original coalition, but the aesthetic principles Klimt pioneered — the fusion of fine and applied art, the decorative field as expressive form — remained central to his work. The portrait sits at the intersection of his psychological penetration in figural painting and the flattened, pattern-saturated backgrounds characteristic of his Golden Phase, though here muted tones replace the explicit gold of works like Adele Bloch-Bauer I.

Oil on canvas with Klimt's characteristic contrast between illusionistically modelled face and hands against a flattened decorative ground. Loose, feathery brushstrokes build the flesh, while the dress dissolves into painterly abstraction, exploiting the tension between presence and ornament.