The painting “Lady with a Fan” by the Austrian artist Gustav Klimt has sold for 85.3 million pounds (99.2 million euros) in London. Several records were broken at the same time. As the auction house Sotheby’s announced, never before has so much been paid for a work of art at an auction in Europe. The previous record in Europe was £65 million (€75.6 million) for the sculpture ‘L’homme qui marche I’ by Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti, which was sold at Sotheby’s in London in 2010.
At the same time, it is also the highest bid for which a Klimt painting has ever come under the hammer. The record so far was $104.6 million (currently €95.4 million) for Klimt’s painting “Birch Forest”. “Lady with a Fan” was auctioned on behalf of an art collector from Hong Kong during a “ten-minute bidding battle,” according to the Sotheby’s statement.
The estimated price was 75 million euros. And even then, the increase in value would have been enormous: the picture last changed hands at Sotheby’s in New York in 1994 for 11.6 million US dollars (today around 10.5 million euros).
Klimt (1862 – 1918) was the most famous representative of the Vienna Secession (Art Nouveau). Today only a few of his paintings are privately owned. According to Sotheby’s, when Klimt died there were still two works in his Vienna studio, “Lady with a Fan” was one of them. Klimt died of a stroke at the age of 55. The identity of the “lady with a fan” is unknown, but it was not a commissioned work. A strong Asian influence is evident – Klimt was a lover of Japanese and Chinese art and often wore a kimono.