‘Black Klimt’ steps out of shadows and into political tug-of-war

One day in the summer of 2023, a man entered a gallery in Vienna with the intention of selling a painting by Gustav Klimt. The person who greeted him thought it was a joke and kindly sent him on his way.

But when the owner of the W&K gallery was told what had happened, he ran after the man down the street.

Ebi Kohlbacher, an expert on the great Austrian symbolist artist, knew that some of Klimt’s paintings had been lost.

The man showed him a photograph of a canvas that had been lost for eighty years, a portrait of Prince William Nii Nortey Dowuona, an African aristocrat who was known to have met and posed for Klimt.

Kohlbacher told AFP it was “one of the rare black paintings created by a major artist in European art.”

Experts say Dowuona was the head of a group of Ga people from near Accra, Ghana, who were part of the infamous “human zoo” exhibition of African village life that attracted huge crowds in Vienna in 1897.

Since the painting belonged to the Klein family, a wealthy Austrian Jewish family, it disappeared after World War II.

“We needed to establish beyond any doubt where the study came from,” Kohlbacher told AFP.

Another expert, Alfred Weidinger, helped confirm that the portrait was authentic and mapped its history.

The Klein family, wine merchants, acquired the painting after Klimt’s death in 1918. They fled Austria after the Nazi annexation in 1938 and entrusted the painting to a woman, who later moved to Hungary.

But when the communists seized power in Budapest in 1949, the woman ignored all the family’s appeals to return it, and the painting disappeared from public view.

It had four known owners in Hungary between 1988 and 2023, when it was taken back to Austria for expert analysis after Hungary granted an export licence.

– Klimt ‘respected’ him –

Klimt’s works now sell for astronomical sums – his “Woman with a Fan” sold for $108 million in 2023 – and Weidinger praised the portrait of the prince as one of the artist’s “important” works.

Weidinger said that the floral elements in the oil painting, which later became one of Klimt’s characteristic features, indicate “an important stage in the evolution of his artistic language.”

“This transitional phase is particularly defined by the tension between the meticulously detailed and naturalistic figure of the prince” and the “vivid, almost expressionistic depiction of the background”, he added.

Kohlbacher said Klimt knew and respected the prince.

“It is clear that the painting reflects his admiration,” he said.

The prince led a delegation of 120 Africans who traveled throughout the Austro-Hungarian empire and posed for six months in a spectacle visited by up to 10,000 people a day.

Weidinger said the painting marked a turning point in Europeans’ perception of Africans.

The expert said that despite problematic colonial prejudices and the show’s apparent “voyeurism”, Africans “are no longer separate from the public”.

“The Viennese bourgeoisie took them to cafes and shopping, showed them local monuments,” he added.

– Enter Viktor Orban’s Hungary –

But there’s another side to the story, thanks to Hungary’s new passion for the lost African prince.

The last owner of the painting is allowed to sell it under the agreement signed in line with the 1998 Washington Principles on the return of assets seized from Holocaust victims.

The original owner, Ernestine Klein, who died in 1973, has a secret arrangement with her grandchildren.

But Budapest will have none of this, insisting that the export license is not valid and that such a valuable product should never have left the country.

While the W&K gallery hopes Hungary will respect the Washington Principles, the Vienna prosecutor confirmed to AFP that it had received a seizure order from Budapest, which wants the “Black Klimt” back.

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