Ronald S. Lauder, the billionaire cosmetics inheritor and artwork collector, will proceed to personal a well known portray by Gustav Klimt, which he has held for 50 years, after agreeing to the restitution and repurchase of the work from the heirs of a Jewish lady who had owned it earlier than World Battle II.

Phrases of the acquisition, which adopted a number of years of analysis into the portray’s historical past, weren’t disclosed.

Mr. Lauder first purchased the work, “The Black Feather Hat,” created in 1910, from a Manhattan gallery in 1973, and it has been displayed in a number of reveals on the Neue Galerie, which Mr. Lauder based. In 2007, it was featured on banners hung in Manhattan to advertise the museum’s present on Klimt that opened that 12 months.

The portray had as soon as been the property of Irene Beran, who had it till no less than 1934, when she lived within the metropolis of Brno, which is now a part of the Czech Republic. She later fled Europe, fearing Nazi persecution.

Mr. Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Congress, and the heirs stated in a press release that, regardless of ample analysis, the portray’s “whereabouts” between 1934 and 1957 — when it resurfaced in an exhibit in Salzburg organized partially by Friedrich Welz — remained unclear.

That hole within the portray’s provenance and its overlap with a interval wherein the Nazis plundered artwork all through Europe was a motivating consider Mr. Lauder’s resolution to maneuver ahead with this restitution, as was the household’s struggling within the Holocaust, based on his representatives.

“Having been an ardent advocate for the restitution of artworks stolen and dispossessed” throughout World Battle II,” Mr. Lauder stated within the assertion, “I felt it was vital to acknowledge the household’s earlier historical past with this work regardless of the shortage of concrete documentation concerning how this portray left the Beran assortment.”

The work, a portrait of a pensive lady sporting a wide-brimmed hat, is seen by some as a marked departure from the extremely ornamental work, many incorporating gold leaf, that Klimt had created at the start of the Twentieth century.

Mr. Lauder opened the Neue Galerie in 2001 to exhibit early Twentieth-century Austrian and German artwork, and the Klimt portray was exhibited throughout considered one of its first exhibits, “New Worlds: German and Austrian Artwork 1890-1930.” Most lately, the work was displayed on the museum throughout an exhibit of Austrian masterworks that closed in 2020.

In 2018, Mr. Lauder agreed with the Beran household heirs to start reviewing the work’s historical past. Based on the assertion, analysis discovered that Ms. Beran had owned the portray as early as 1928 and that it had turn into a part of the household’s assortment years earlier by way of her father-in-law, Alois Beran. Ms. Beran and her husband, Bruno Beran, fled Europe in early 1941, touring first to Canada after which shifting to New York in 1947.

The assertion described the Beran heirs as “assured that Irene can be delighted to know that ‘The Black Feather Hat’ discovered a house in New York, a metropolis that had, at an vital juncture in her refugee life, additionally been Irene’s residence.”

Ms. Beran’s mom and Mr. Beran’s brother, Philip, to whom Ms. Beran had been married earlier than the battle, remained in Europe and didn’t survive. Relations stated that each had been taken by the Nazis to the Theresienstadt focus camp in what’s as we speak the Czech Republic and had subsequently been murdered.