Gustav Klimt painting fetches $40.4m

A 1915 Gustav Klimt landscape, looted by the Nazis and recently returned to the owner's grandson, has sold for $40.4m at a New York auction, BBC News reported.

Litzlberg on the Attersee was returned to Georges Jorisch, 83, by Salzburg's Museum of Modern Arts in July.

Other highlights of the Sotheby's impressionist and modern art sale included Picasso oil painting L'Aubade, which sold for $23m.

David Norman, of Sotheby's, said the market had "really roared back".

Litzlberg on the Attersee, a painting of a lake in western Austria, was originally owned by Austrian iron magnate Viktor Zuckerkandl before being passed on to his sister, Amalie Redlich, when he died in 1927.

She was deported in 1941 and never heard of again. Her art collection was seized by the Nazis and sold off.

Auction records were set for French impressionist Gustave Caillebotte, whose Le pont d'Argenteuil et la Seine fetched $9.3m, and Russian-born Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka, whose Le reve (Rafaela sur fond vert) sold for $8.5m.