Klimt paintings sell for $192.5 million

Five paintings with Nazi-era histories, including four by Austrian artist Gustav Klimt, were sold at Christie’s auction house Wednesday night.

The Klimts, which had been displayed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, sold for a combined $192.5 million, including a portrait of a wealthy industrialist’s wife that went for $87.9 million.

The fifth painting, a Berlin street scene by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, sold for $38 million.

All the paintings exceeded their presale estimates, Christie’s said. The identities of the buyers were not immediately released. The sale prices included auction house commissions of 20% up to $200,000 and 12% above that.

The four Klimts previously had been the focus of a restitution feud between their Jewish heirs and the Austrian government. They most recently had hung in New York City’s Neue Galerie museum.

Those paintings were handed over by Austria in January to Maria Altmann, niece of a Viennese art patron, following a seven-year legal battle.

An arbitration court had ruled that the works were improperly seized when the Nazis took over Austria during World War II.

The work by Kirchner, “Berliner Strassenszene,” recently was turned over to the heirs of Jewish shoe factory owner Alfred Hess by the Brucke Museum in Berlin, where it had hung since 1980. The heirs claimed Hess had been forced to hand the work over to the Nazis.

Meanwhile, a descendant of former owners of a Picasso painting with a controversial Nazi-era history sued to recover the canvas, which had been scheduled to be auctioned Wednesday, prompting Christie’s to withdraw it from sale.

Christie’s and the Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber Art Foundation, a London-based charity that owns the piece, said that “with great reluctance” they were withdrawing “the magnificent Blue Period ‘Portrait de Angel Fernandez de Soto’ ” from the sale of Impressionist and Modern Art.