Another major painting has joined New York's November auction season. Christie's will offer Gustav Klimt's Litzlbergkeller, painted in 1915-16, at its 20th-century evening sale on 17 November, carrying an estimate of 60 million to 80 million dollars. The picture shows a quiet stretch of Lake Attersee in the Austrian countryside, where Klimt spent his summers from 1900 until his death in 1918. Its focus is the Litzlberg Cellar, a brewery and inn wrapped in foliage painted in flat planes of green with fine stippling.

The painting has an unusually full ownership story. It was commissioned by the banking magnate Otto Primavesi, a long-standing patron of the artist, and later passed through the hands of the anthropologist and photographer Hugo Bernatzik and a collector named Kurt Wieser before reaching Serge Sabarsky, co-founder of New York's Neue Galerie. After Sabarsky died in 1997, the work sold at Sotheby's for 14.7 million dollars, more than doubling the previous record for a Klimt landscape at the time. That sum equals roughly 30.9 million dollars in today's money.

Christie's describes the estimate as the most conservative valuation for a mature Klimt landscape in nearly a decade, according to its global chairman for 20th- and 21st-century art, Max Carter. The context explains why the figure still looks large: Klimt's landscapes have climbed sharply in value. His Blumenwiese made 86 million dollars and Waldabhang bei Unterach am Attersee made 68.3 million dollars in the same Lauder collection sale last year, while Birch Forest, from 1903, holds the landscape record at 104.5 million dollars from Christie's in 2022. His overall auction record remains a portrait, the 236.4 million dollars paid for Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer last year.

The Klimt will not be alone at the top of the sale. Wassily Kandinsky's Betonte Ecken, from 1922-23, carries the same 60 million to 80 million dollar estimate and could break the Russian painter's auction record. Nine works from the collection of Jeff Koons are also expected to bring up to 100 million dollars combined, making the evening one of the most closely watched of the autumn season.