'BLACK KLIMT' STEPS INTO TUG-OF-WAR

BUDAPEST LAYS CLAIM TO FAMOUS PAINTING WHICH RESURFACED TWO YEARS AGO AFTER BEING LOST FOR DECADES

- STORY: BLAISE GAUQUELIN / AFP

A man walked into a Viennese gallery one day in the summer of 2023 looking to sell a Gustav Klimt painting.

The person who greeted him thought it was a joke, and gently sent him on his way. But when the owner of the W&K gallery was told what had happened, he ran down the street after the man.

Ebi Kohlbacher is an expert on the great Austrian symbolist artist and knew some Klimt paintings had been lost.

He caught up with the man, who showed him a photo of a canvas lost for eight decades — a portrait of Prince William Nii Nortey Dowuona, an African aristocrat who is known to have met Klimt and posed for him.

It is “one of the rare paintings of a black person in European art created by a great artist’”, Mr Kohlbacher told AFP.

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

The painting vanished after World War II, having been owned by a wealthy Jewish Austrian family, the Kleins.