Christie’s to sell heirs’ four Klimts

The heirs of Ferdinand and Adele Bloch-Bauer, who sold a Gustav Klimt portrait to New York cosmetics magnate Ronald Lauder’s Neue Galerie for a record $135 million in June, will sell their four other Klimt canvases through the auction house Christie’s.

Christie’s and the family haven’t decided whether to sell the works through auction or more quietly, the auction house said. But a spokesman for the family said that if works are put on the auction block, they would most likely be part of Christie’s Nov. 8 sale of Impressionist and modern works in New York.

The Bloch-Bauer heirs, led by 90-year-old Maria Altmann of Los Angeles, took ownership of the five paintings in January after an Austrian legal ruling that the paintings had been wrongly taken from the family during the rise of the Nazis in Vienna in the late 1930s.

“Adele Bloch-Bauer I,” the so-called gold portrait from 1907, drew the most interest and was first to sell. But in the currently booming art market, experts have speculated, the other four -- three landscapes and a later portrait of Adele -- could together fetch more than $100 million, perhaps even $150 million.

The works, now on display at the Neue Galerie, were exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from April through June.

LACMA leaders had expressed interest in buying all five together. LACMA Director Michael Govan has been noncommittal about the museum’s interest in the remaining four.

- Christopher Reynolds