The saga of Gustav Klimt's Portrait of Fraulein Lieser (1917) has taken another turn. The consignor of the painting, Eva Ropper, whose €30m sale at the Vienna auction house Im Kinsky in 2024 was later cancelled over disputes about its tangled provenance, now faces a lawsuit in the United States that could keep the painting off the market for years to come.

The dispute centres on which branch of a Jewish industrialist family owned the painting before it was lost during the Nazi era. The sitter's identity is disputed: the catalogue raisonne says she was Margarethe, daughter of Adolf Lieser, while Im Kinsky suggested she was a daughter of Henriette Lieser-Landau, ex-wife of Adolf's brother Justus, who was deported in 1942 and murdered by the Nazis in 1943. The portrait was still unfinished in Klimt's studio at his death in 1918.

Heirs of both Adolf Lieser and Henriette Lieser-Landau were included in a potential settlement that would have divided the sale revenue 60/40 between the claimants and Ropper. At the April 2024 auction, the advisory Patti Wong & Associates bid €30m on behalf of an anonymous Hong Kong buyer — the low end of the estimate, but the highest price ever bid at an auction in Austria. The sale collapsed when another claimant emerged: Patricia Leahy, the granddaughter of Hans Lieser, who was Margarethe's brother.

Leahy's lawyer filed a complaint in April in the Supreme Court of the State of New York against Im Kinsky and Ropper, requesting a declaratory judgment that Leahy is a rightful heir and owner of the portrait. The complaint alleges the Hong Kong buyer withdrew after failing to reach an agreement with Leahy, who was excluded from the original settlement in which all other claimants signed away further claims. By mid-October, six months after the complaint was announced and widely distributed, it still had not been served on Ropper, according to her Vienna lawyer Robert Bachner,, who called it unjustified. Im Kinsky said it no longer has the painting or a relationship with the consignor; Ropper has commissioned a more detailed provenance report.