Vienna's Dorotheum opens its fourth major auction week of the year on 17 November, with around 550 works of modern and contemporary art going under the hammer across a series of sales that runs until 3 December. The centrepiece of the Modern Art sale is a painting that has not been seen in public for nine decades, and its reappearance is being treated as a small art-historical event in its own right.

The work is Max Oppenheimer's The Hess Quartet: String Quartet No. 1, painted in 1914 and the artist's first depiction of musicians. Oppenheimer, a pioneer of Austrian Expressionism who moved in the circles of Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka, first showed the canvas at the Freie Secession in Berlin in 1914. It was last exhibited publicly at the Vienna Secession in January 1936, after which it vanished from view. It has now resurfaced from a private collection in the Czech Republic, where it had been held by one family since the 1930s, and carries an estimate of €300,000 to €500,000.

The same sale offers four newly discovered works on paper by leading figures of Viennese Modernism. Two drawings by Gustav Klimt depict female figures: Seated Girl with Bent Legs and Dress, from around 1909–10, is estimated at €80,000–120,000, while a Seated Nude from around 1907 carries an estimate of €30,000–50,000. Egon Schiele is represented by a 1911 drawing of a woman in a dotted blouse and a gouache Portrait of a Soldier, estimated at €120,000–180,000 and €160,000–250,000. Alfons Walde's Ascent of the Skiers, from around 1935, is expected to fetch €450,000–700,000.

The Contemporary Art sale on 18 November widens the focus beyond Austria, with Ad Reinhardt's 1952 Abstract Painting (Green) estimated at €400,000–600,000, alongside works by Victor Vasarely, Giorgio de Chirico and Daniel Richter, and a group of Italian avant-garde pieces by Piero Dorazio, Carla Accardi and Enrico Castellani. The week closes on 3 December with an Editions sale featuring works by Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Gerhard Richter.