Klimt’s “Lady with a Fan” became the most expensive work sold at auction in Europe: 98 million euros

Job the lady with the fan from Austrian Gustav Klimt set a record for a European work of art when it sold for 85 million pounds (98 million euros) on Tuesday, Sotheby’s auction house in London announced. Furthermore, this purchase price became the second highest ever at auction for a portrait from any period. After a ten-minute auction among four bidders, the painting was purchased by Patti Wong (founder of Patti Wong & Associates), who bid in the room for a collector from Hong Kong.

As reported by Europa Press, the price achieved surpasses the 65 million pounds (75 million euros) that it is The walking man Iby Alberto Giacometti, sold at Sotheby’s London in 2010. It also beats the previous Klimt auction record ($104.6 million) for Birch Forest from the Paul G. Allen Collection, sold last year in New York.

the lady with the fan it was last offered for sale nearly thirty years ago at Sotheby’s in New York in 1994, when it was bought for £7.8 million, setting a new auction record for the artist.

The auction house states that the work was created when Klimt was still at his artistic peak, and at a time when the “formality” of his first orders gave way to a new expressiveness, a deeper and more joyful immersion in drawing, color and form, which, although under under the clear influence of his contemporaries Van Gogh, Matisse and Gauguin, became something completely different in his hands.

The portrait, which depicts a woman whose name has never been published, was still on an easel in Klimt’s studio when the artist died, aged 55, in Vienna. For the auction house’s experts, the work combines “all the technical skill and creative exuberance” that Klimt cultivated up until 1918, when he was still at one of his greatest creative moments.

The canvas, which has been part of a private collection since 1994, according to Sotheby’s data, belonged to the Viennese industrialist Erwin Bohler, then to his brother and the latter’s widow until the 1940s, and much later, in 1988, to the American businessman and patron Wendell Cherry.