Klimt’s ‘Lady With a Fan’ fetches $108.4 million, an auction record for the artist

Klimt’s art-historical importance as a leader of the Viennese Secession movement at the turn of the century and the decorative opulence of his paintings have always made him a highly regarded artist. But those values ​​took on another dimension in 2006 when New York-based cosmetics mogul Ronald S. Lauder paid $135 million for the gold-infused 1907 portrait of the artist, a prominent hostess of Viennese society, “Adele Bloch-Bauer I .”

The price, negotiated in a private sale, was the highest price for any work of art at the time. that masterpiece, from Klimt’s so-called ‘Golden Phase’, had been the subject of a lengthy restitution case that was dramatized in a 2015 film starring Helen Mirren. “Woman in Gold” is now Lauder’s central exhibit New Gallery museum in New York.

More recently, in 2017, in another private transaction, Oprah Winfrey sold Klimt’s 1912 “Adele Bloch-Bauer II” to a Chinese collector for $150 million, according to Bloomberg. That slightly later portrait of the charismatic Bloch-Bauer had a colorful, loosely painted background of exotic textiles, similar to ‘Lady with a Fan’. Scholars link this decoration to the fashion for “Japonism” that influenced European artists at the time.

Tuesday’s all-time record price, higher than any work achieved last month at a subpar set of New York auctions, went against recent market trends. Since the 2016 UK vote to leave the European Union, major auction houses Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips have struggled to attract top quality works for their sales in the British capital.

Stimulated by the presence of the Klimt — and by a Lucian Freud “Night Interior” from 1968-69, which sold for $12.2 million – Sotheby’s two-part evening sale of 73 lots of modern and contemporary art brought in $252.9 million. Sotheby’s equivalent evening sales in the summer of 2015, a year before the Brexit vote, brought in about $486 million at the time.

On Wednesday evenings, Christie’s is offering 67 lots of 20th and 21st century artworks estimated to fetch at least $72 million, highlighted by Paul Signac’s 1896 landscape:Calanque des Canoubiers (Pointe de Bamer), Saint-Tropez‘, worth $7 million. Christie’s London equivalent sales in 2015 were approximately $263 million.