Gustav Klimt's lush green landscape Litzlbergkeller (1915-16) will headline Christie's 20th Century Evening Sale in New York on November 17, with an estimate of $60-80 million. According to Artforum, Christie's is selling the work for an unnamed client and has confirmed it is guaranteed to sell.

The painting last appeared at auction in May 1997, when it fetched $14.7 million at Sotheby's in New York — an artist record at the time — making this its first auction appearance in nearly three decades.

For devoted Klimt watchers, the surprise is how long this canvas stayed out of the auction market.

A work of this quality resurfacing at all — let alone with a top estimate of $80 million — is the kind of quiet reappearance the auction calendar rarely offers, and it arrives just a year after the artist's market was rewritten entirely.

Commissioned by Austrian banker and art patron Otto Primavesi, the painting depicts a brewery and inn on the northern shore of Lake Attersee, where Klimt spent summers from 1900 until his death in 1918.

Sources describe dense green foliage and shimmering reflections on the water, combining Klimt's decorative technique with elements of abstraction.

Before the sale, the work will be exhibited in Hong Kong from October 27 to 29, then displayed at Christie's Rockefeller Center galleries in New York from November 7.

The estimate reflects a Klimt market transformed in recent years. The artist's current auction record stands at $236.4 million, set in November 2025 when *Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer* sold at Sotheby's in New York.

Another landscape, *Birch Forest*, brought $104.5 million at Christie's in 2022. If *Litzlbergkeller* hammers in its expected range, it would land far above its 1997 price of $14.7 million — a striking measure of how the top of the market for Klimt's landscapes has escalated over a generation.

The Klimt consignment lands amid a broader wave of enthusiasm for early modernist art.

In Paris, a painting by Czech abstraction pioneer František Kupka, *Espace non-descriptif* (1914-22), sold for €8.99 million at Sotheby's on October 23, exceeding its €8 million upper estimate and setting a new euro-denominated international auction record for the artist, according to expats.cz.

Christie's, meanwhile, is presenting more than $130 million of art in Abu Dhabi ahead of its first fine-art auction there, including Kandinsky's *Betonte Ecken* (1923) at a $60-80 million estimate.

The road to November 17 runs through two preview stops: Hong Kong first, where the painting is on view October 27-29, then Christie's Rockefeller Center galleries from November 7.

With Christie's telling Art News that the lot is guaranteed to sell, the only open question is how far above the $60 million low estimate bidding climbs — and whether the work that defined Klimt's auction standing in 1997 can help define it again in 2026.