Just weeks after a Gustav Klimt seascape landed in Sotheby’s top impressionist lots of the spring season, the auction house has unveiled another rare portrait of Klimt—and it has the highest price of any work ever offered in Europe.
Dame mit Fächer (Lady with a fan)painted towards the end of the artist’s life in 1918, will be offered at the London Modern and Contemporary Art Evening Sale on June 27. The presale estimate is in the region of 65 million pounds (80 million dollars) and since the work is backed by an irrevocable offer, or an outside guarantor, it will certainly sell.
The work, the last portrait Klimt ever painted, has been billed as “one of his finest works, painted when he was still at his artistic peak,by Helena Newman, European President of Sotheby’s and Global Head of Impressionist and Modern Art.
Klimt began with the portrait, whose model is not known, when he was already considered one of the most sought after and famous portrait painters in Europe. However, it was a rare work painted entirely in pursuit of its own interest, the auction house said.
“Filled with freedom and spontaneity, it reflects Klimt’s joy in painting it and celebrating the beauty in its purest form. While portraits were traditionally painted in the vertical form, Klimt returns here to the square format he used for his landscapes at the beginning of the century. The style and symbols also reflect the artist’s well-documented fascination with Japanese and Chinese culture.
Gustave Klimt, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907). Courtesy of Neue Galerie.
Until early 2003, the record for a Klimt painting was just under $30 million, set at Sotheby’s New York. Klimt’s market took off in 2006 after it emerged that cosmetics mogul Ronald Lauder had bought Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1903-07), work returned to the heirs of a Nazi victim of the Belvedere Museum in Austria, during a private sale, for 135 million dollars. The price of the part, which remains the jewel of Lauder’s Upper East Side museum, the Neue Galerie, shocked many at the time, as it was then the highest figure ever paid for a painting, surpassing even the highest auction price of 104 million dollars for Picasso. boy with a pipe sold at Sotheby’s in 2004.
The excitement that surrounded the purchase of Lauder immediately and sustainably stimulated the Klimt market. The other four remaining works which were returned to the American heir were sold at Christie’s in November of the same year. Adele Bloch-Bauer II, a 1912 portrait in darker tones, fetched $87.9 million and is currently the second highest result at auction. For a time, Klimt was the second most expensive artist at auction after Picasso.
The auction data also reflects the scarcity of Klimt paintings on the market. For example, the overall auction volume in 2005 was $2.5 million, according to Artnet Analytics (see chart below). In 2006, the same year Lauder purchased Adele’s portrait and the remaining four returned works which were also auctioned at Christie’s, the overall auction volume soared to $196.4 million. In 2007, this figure fell much closer to previous typical levels, standing at $5 million.
The current auction record for a Klimt painting is the $104.6 million record set last November for birch forest (1903) from the prestigious collection of the late co-founder of Microsoft, Paul Allen, sold at Christie’s.
Gustave Klimt, Insel im Attersee (c. 1901–2). With an unpublished estimate, it sold for $53.2 million. Courtesy of Sotheby’s.
Last month, Sotheby’s sold Insel im Attersee (Island in the Attersee) (1901-1902), a rare seascape by the artist, painted at his favorite summer vacation spot, a lake near Salzburg. It made $53.2 million and was also backed by a third-party guarantee.
As for Dame mit Fächer (Lady with a fan), it was acquired shortly after Klimt’s death by Erwin Böhler, a Viennese industrialist. Böhler, his brother Heinrich and his cousin Hans were all close friends of Klimt and Egon Schiele. They even vacationed with Klimt at Attersee.
Source: Artnet Analytics
The work finally passed to Heinrich and then, after his death in 1940, to Heinrich’s wife, Mabel. In 1967 it was part of the collection of Rudolf Leopold, who is known to have purchased a large group of Schiele drawings from Mabel Böhler in 1952, and may also have acquired this work from her.
The painting was the last put up for sale nearly thirty years ago, in 1994, when it was acquired by the family of the current owner. The price at the time was $11.7 million, sold at auction at Sotheby’s New York. Most it was recently the subject of an exhibition at the Belvedere in Vienna where it was brought together with and shown alongside Klimt’s other ending masterpieces.
Sotheby’s will display the painting in its New Bond Street galleries later this month ahead of the sale. The auction house said the exhibition will “mark a major moment” for Klimt fans in London, with three major portraits of the artist on display simultaneously. The other portraits, Hermine Gallia (1904) and Adele Bloch Bauer II (1912), are currently on view in the National Gallery exhibition “after impressionism.”
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