Gustav Klimt portrait makes record for any work sold in Europe

Dame mit Fächer (Lady with a Fan) was estimated ‘in the region of £65m’. With Sotheby’s having arranged an ‘irrevocable bid’ on the lot in advance of the auction (in effect a third-party guarantee), it was always bound to sell on the night.

The picture drew four bidders, two in the room and two on the phone. After the price reached £68m, it came down to a battle between art advisor Patti Wong, formerly Sotheby’s international chairman, who was sitting at the front of the saleroom and who won the lot against determined underbidding from a bidder on the phone to Sotheby’s deputy chairman of Asia and chairman of China Jen Hua.

Sotheby’s said that Wong was bidding on behalf of a client in Hong Kong.

It broke the 13 year-old record for a work sold in Europe which had stood since Alberto Giacometti’s (1901-66) sculpture L’Homme qui Marche I had made £58m in the same room in 2010. Dame mit Fächer was one of only a small number of portraits by Klimt still in private hands and had last appeared on the market in 1994 when it sold at Sotheby’s New York for $10.6m (£7.1m). The buyer back then was a member of the current vendor’s family.

Sotheby’s said it was “among his finest works, created when he was still in his artistic prime”, even though it was produced slightly outside Klimt’s famous ‘golden period’ when he painted a series of celebrated portraits such as his Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I which dates from a decade earlier.

The Gustav Klimt painting that sold at Sotheby’s was the artist’s last portrait although the sitter is unknown.

The 3ft 4in (1m) square oil on canvas was still standing on an easel in Klimt’s studio in Vienna at the time of his untimely death (he died after suffering a stroke and catching pneumonia). The identity of the sitter is unknown, although it has been suggested that it may have been one of the artist’s regular paid models, Johanna Staude.

The current sale followed some high prices for Klimt landscapes sold in the last year, including Birch Forest which sold at Christie’s Paul Allen sale in New York in November for $91m (£80m). While that price was an auction record for the artist, Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I was sold privately to Ronald Lauder for $135m in 2006 while Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II was sold privately by Oprah Winfrey to a Chinese buyer for $150m in 2016.

Provenance

The current painting was acquired shortly after Klimt’s death by Viennese industrialist Erwin Böhler whose family were close friends and patrons of both Klimt and Egon Schiele. The work eventually passed to his brother Heinrich and then, upon his death in 1940, to Heinrich’s wife Mabel.

By 1967 it was in the collection of Austrian collector 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.

As well as the Sotheby’s sale in 1994, it has since appeared in a number of exhibitions including, most recently, one at the Belvedere in Vienna where it was shown alongside a number of Klimt’s other late and important works.