Klimt is King

Move over, Picasso.

The New York Times reported this morning that Gustave Klimt’s 1907 portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, wife of a Jewish sugar industrialist, Viennese art circle hostess extraordinaire and possible lover of Klimt, has sold privately for $135 million, becoming the highest price ever paid for a painting. The record was previously held by Picasso’s Boy With a Pipe, which sold for $104 million in May of 2004, followed closely by the Spaniard’s Dora Maar with Cat, which recently crossed the block for $95 million.

Unlike those sales, whose buyers still remain shrouded in mystery and speculation, the buyer on this one has not denied shelling out the doucats. The collector signing the check? Cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder, whose passion for the arts of early 20th-century Austria and Germany led him to open his own private museum, the Neue Galerie, in Manhattan some five years ago.

The dreamy portrait, which shows the white-shouldered, red-lipped beauty emerging from a fabulously patterned, sumptously gold-leafed background, adds to an already impressive collection of paintings in the Neue Galerie by Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele and Max Beckmann (among others), along with decorative arts ranging from the Vienna Secession and Weiner Werkstatte to the Bauhaus. “This is our Mona Lisa,” Mr. Lauder gushed to the Times‘ Carol Vogel. Apparently the auction house Christie’s helped to broker the deal.

Lauder, long a supporter of Jewish cultural renewal, bought the work from descendants of Mrs. Bloch-Bauer, who only recently restituted the work after a long battle with the Austrian government. Mrs. Bloch-Bauer had died of meningitis in 1925 and her husband was forced to flee Austria when Germany annexed it in 1938, leaving all of his possessions behind. The painting had been confiscated by the Nazis and placed in Austrian Gallery.

The Viennese masterpiece goes on public view at the Neue Galerie in mid-July. That’s more than we can say for those Picassos, which appear, for the time being at least, to be staying in the shadows. —M.S.

For more, go to:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/19/arts/design/19klim.html?_r=
1&oref=slogin
(Registration required to access this story.)

This entry was posted on Monday, June 19th, 2006 at 7:38 am and is filed under Fine Art. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.