Almost a century later reappears portrait that Klimt made to a Ghanaian prince

Madrid. The portrait of the artist Gustav Klimt to the Prince of Ghana Guillermo Nii Nortey Dowuona reappeared after 97 years at the Tefaf Contemporary Art Fair, of Maastricht, thanks to the Viennese Wienerroither & Kohlbachepor (W & K) gallery. Tefaf sources confirmed that paint is on sale for more than 16 million dollars.

The portrait – cited in 1897 – should have made its first public appearance at the Austrian gallery stand in the last edition of the Fair. However, local media explain that Sudden legal uncertainties They prevented their presentation.

This rediscovery began in 2021, when a couple of collectors went to W & K and presented the painting, poorly framed and very dirty, in which a seal of Gustav Klimt was found barely visibleexplains the gallery itself.

Alfred Weidinger, expert Profess lost of an African prince that he had been looking for for two decades. This painting belongs to the artist’s first years; It shows an important representative of the Ghana OSU (GA) and was created in the context of Vienna Vienna of 1897.

Weidinger says that not only documes a phase of stylistic change In Klimt’s work, but also reflects the complex interdependencies historical between Europe and the rest of the world.

After Klimt painted the portrait, he remained probably held by the artist until 1923, when he would be auctioned in S. Kende, from Vienna. Subsequently, in 1928, it is documented as a loan for Klimt’s commemorative exhibition in Vienna’s secession as owned by Ernestine Klein.

Klein and her husband, Felix, who had turned the old Klimt studio into the Viennese neighborhood of Hetzing, were forced to flee in 1938 due to their Jewish origins, and although they survived the war in Monaco, the painting remained lost until it was rediscovered in 2023.