84 million francs: this is the most expensive painting ever auctioned in Europe “Chaos in Russia is a nightmare for Beijing”

A painting by Austrian painter Gustav Klimt has fetched more than 84 million francs (74 million pounds) at auction. The painting «Lady with fan» is the most expensive painting ever auctioned in Europe. The auction was conducted by the traditional auction house Sotheby’s in London.

The record for the highest price at an art auction in Europe was held by Alberto Giacometti’s sculpture “Walking Man I”, which Sotheby’s auctioned for £65 million in 2010.

However, the auction in London does not set a Klimt record with the price achieved. Competitor Christie’s still has the “Buchenwald” (birch forest), which hit $105 million last fall in New York. And aside from the official auction, Oprah Winfrey privately sold her “Adele Bloch-Bauer II” to a Chinese collector for $150 million in 2016.

Probably the last work

Gustav Klimt was an important Austrian painter and the most famous representative of Viennese Art Nouveau. He was also the co-founder and chairman of the Vienna Secession, an association of visual artists in Vienna.

The “Lady with fan” is probably the last portrait painting that Klimt made. The portrait of an unknown woman, behind whom a Viennese dancer is supposed, is decorated with Asian motifs and was still on the easel in his studio when the Art Nouveau master died in 1918. The painter made the approximately one by one meter ” lady” of her own accord and without order.

After all, the story of the “lady” is a tortuous one. The work had been owned by the Heinrich Böhler family in Switzerland since the 1920s, where it remained until the 1960s. What is certain is that it remained in Rudolf Leopold’s collection for some time afterwards, at least until 1981.

In 1994, the penultimate transfer of ownership finally took place in New York, where the “lady with a fan” set the Klimt peak value at the time at $ 11.67 million – a value now far exceeded in London. (sda/afp/apa)