NEW YORK.- Christie’s President Marc Porter today announced the sale at auction of four paintings by Gustav Klimt that were restituted to the heirs of Ferdinand and Adele Bloch-Bauer earlier this year. Their sale at auction will accent one family’s heroic battle to recover cherished treasures and tell a profound story of lives destroyed through Nazi persecution. The sale will also reinforce the Bloch-Bauer heirs’ effort to share these masterpieces with the world, having concluded blockbuster exhibitions on both the West and East coasts as well as the record setting sale of Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I to the Neue Galerie in New York -- considered to be the most expensive painting ever sold. On August 7th of this year, the Bloch-Bauer heirs announced the selection of Christie’s as their advisors on the sale of the four remaining Klimt paintings. Christie’s has advised the family to sell at public auction, to best highlight those rare elements that the paintings possess: freshness to the market, quality, and provenance.

“Beyond recovering these masterpieces, my family and I are pleased and honored to have been able to present them publicly through two highly-visited and highly-acclaimed exhibitions,” said Maria Altmann, niece of Adele and Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer. “These paintings, their restitution, the subsequent display in Los Angeles and New York, along with extensive media coverage, have informed millions of people that, in this particular case, justice prevailed. Now that we have achieved this, we have entrusted Christie’s with placing these remaining paintings in important collections through their November auction. Christie’s chairman Stephen Lash has long been our friend and supporter in our recovery efforts, making it our pleasure to work with Christie’s to sell these paintings.”

“The addition of these four powerful artworks in our November sale will make it Christie’s New York’s most important auction ever,” said Mr. Porter. “This is a most fantastic moment following a decade of heroic efforts by the Bloch-Bauer heirs to recover these pictures and use that challenge to help educate the media, the art world and the larger public of the timeless beauty of these paintings and the profound story surrounding them. It will be our distinct honor to help place them in superb collections.”

All four paintings will be offered during Christie’s evening sale of Impressionist and Modern Art on November 8 in New York. Earlier this month The Neue Galerie announced the extension until October 9 of its Klimt exhibition, Gustav Klimt: Five Paintings from the Collection of Ferdinand and Adele Bloch-Bauer. The exhibition is led by Adele Bloch-Bauer I, Klimt’s golden masterwork, and further includes the four other works restituted to the family that will be offered at Christie’s: Adele Bloch Bauer II, Houses in Unterach on Lake Atter (Häuser in Unterach am Attersee), Apple Tree I (Apfelbaum I) and Birch Forest (Buchenwald). The four works are expected to realize in excess of $93 million.

September’s Art In America magazine noted that, “In terms of artistic importance and monetary worth, this was the most significant of all recent Nazi-loot restitution cases.” Since the announcement of the paintings’ restitution earlier this year, the Austrian painter and his work have continually been in the news globally. Adele Bloch-Bauer I, a golden masterpiece painted in 1907 and one of the most magnificent works of art of the 20th century, was recently purchased by The Neue Galerie New York through the efforts of its co-founder, philanthropist Ronald Lauder, in a transaction in which Christie’s assisted Mr. Lauder and the Neue Galerie. The painting provided The Neue Galerie, an elegant museum devoted to German and Austrian art on Fifth Avenue and co-founded by Mr. Lauder, with its own ‘Mona Lisa’ and the exhibition of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, together with the four other restituted Klimt works, has been one of New York’s major cultural events of the summer. The highly reported, multi-million dollar sale placed Adele Bloch-Bauer I on a gilded pedestal but the painting creates mystery all by itself as the record thousands of visitors to the museum have discovered. Whether it is elegant society ladies, lush landscapes or enigmatic trees, Klimt’s incomparable style and highly personal use of colors and motives has captured the public again. 21st century New York is just as mesmerized as fin-de-siècle Vienna.

Adele Bloch-Bauer II

Adele Bloch-Bauer II (estimate: $40 million – $60 million), is a celebration of colors, depicting Adele in a less formal way than her golden portrait. A pattern of red, green, blue and pink color patches, filled with Asian-inspired figures and flowers, supports the still splendid-looking figure of Adele dressed in whites and greys. Besides the outburst of colors, Klimt’s second version of Adele differs from the first one in the way it clearly searches for the depths of her soul and mind, a feature which Klimt, duly impressed by the works of Kokoschka and Schiele, might have adopted from his younger colleagues. As noted by Michael Kimmelman of The New York Times, “ . . . No longer gold and Byzantine with Egyptian flourishes, instead flowery, sketchier and brightly colored, like a Japanese print, she wears a halo made out of the brim of a huge black hat. Her dress is high-collared, not off the shoulder, her body face-forward and erect, a slender, sinuous Coke-bottle shape, more chaste than carnal.” “This extraordinary portrait shares an overpowering presence with the earlier Adele,” said Guy Bennet, Head of Christie’s Impressionist and Modern department. “This adds even greater mystique to Adele Bloch-Bauer II and makes it all the more prized.”

Houses in Unterach on Lake Atter (Häuser in Unterach am Attersee)

Painted when Klimt spent the summer months with the Flöge family in Weissenbach, at Lake Atter, the idea for Houses in Unterach on Lake Atter (Häuser in Unterach am Attersee), 1916 (estimate: $18 million – $25 million), might very well have originated in 1913 when the artist sketched two villages at the Garda Lake. The fabulous view of the village Unterach on the water shows Klimt’s fascination with colors, using them as building stones for his composition and creating at the same time a more liberated, more fluent image. In an inimitable way, Klimt masterfully ignores all rules of perspective: the smooth facades of the houses simultaneously seem to merge with and burst from the surrounding trees.

Apple Tree I (Apfelbaum I)

Throughout his career, Klimt visited and revisited trees as a subject matter, often even devoting his full attention to the texture and lushness of one single specimen. Apple Tree I (Apfelbaum I) (estimate: $15 million – $25 million), was painted in 1911 or 1912 and is one of the illuminating examples of Klimt’s unique method to render the tree through gradations and shades of colors rather than to structure it formally. The result is a tree that is alive and breathing, its foliage touched by a floating breeze while rays of light play games with the leaves. Through these exquisite tree paintings, Klimt created a symbol for the symbiosis of nature and light, with at its center the magnificent Tree of Life.

Birch Forest (Buchenwald)

Birch Forest (Buchenwald) (estimate: $20 million – $30 million), the earliest work by Klimt to be offered, dates from 1903 and is one of the few wood scenes executed by the artist. It is in the wood paintings – in 1901, he painted Pinewood and 1903 saw another version of the Birch Forest – that Klimt connected most with the Impressionist movement.