Pratiksha Shome
With a record estimate for a painting in the UK and Europe, Sotheby’s expects the 1917 portrait Dame with Fächer (Lady with a Fan), the final portrait by Gustav Klimt, will sell for approximately £65 million ($80 million).
The artwork is being marketed by the auction house as “the star of the summer auction season in London” and as “one of the finest and most valuable works of art ever to be offered in Europe.” It was originally sold at Sotheby’s in New York in 1994 for $11.6 million plus fees. On June 27, it will begin to be sold.
Based on recent auction and private sales of the Austrian artist’s works as well as the fact that the majority of Klimt’s commissioned portraits from his golden period are housed in museums, Sotheby’s set a high estimate for Dame mit Fächer (Lady with a Fan). This indicates that hardly any are ever offered for public or private sale.
For instance, in November 2006, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II (1912) fetched a record $87.9 million with fees at Christie’s in New York, more than 3.5 times the high end of its $18 million-$25 million estimate. Oprah Winfrey apparently sold the piece privately for roughly $150 million in 2016, and Bloomberg claims that she was the purchaser. According to the Art Newspaper, Ronald Lauder reportedly paid $135 million for Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I in 2006 to be displayed at the Neue Galerie in New York. Even the family vacationed with Klimt in a lake close to Salzburg, which served as the model for many of the artist’s landscape paintings, and they were captured in a snapshot there.
After being eventually given to Klimt’s close friend and Erwin’s brother Heinrich, Heinrich’s wife Mabel received the artwork in 1940 following Heinrich’s passing. The next owner was Rudolf Leopold, a museum director and art collector from Vienna who acquired numerous Schiele pieces from Mabel Böhler in 1952. Dame with Fächer (Lady with a Fan) was purchased by the present owner’s family in 1994 at a Sotheby’s auction in New York. The name of the family or the reason for the present sale were both kept a secret by Sotheby’s.
Dame mit Fächer (Lady with a Fan) was most recently on display for the first time since it was purchased at the Sotheby’s auction in 1994 as part of the “Gustav Klimt’s Last Works” exhibition at the Belvedere Museum in Vienna in 2021–2022.
Due to Klimt’s depiction of lotus blossoms, phoenixes, and dragons in the background as well as the themes on the unnamed woman’s dress, Sotheby’s Europe Chairman Helena Newman predicted that this painting will draw significant interest from Asian buyers.
According to Newman, Klimt belongs to a select group of painters whose works have fetched over $100 million at auction, together with Modigliani, Picasso, and Giacometti.
Source: ARTnews
