A remarkable painting by Austrian artist Gustav Klimt, titled “Dame mit Fächer” (Lady with a Fan), has fetched a staggering £85.3 million ($108.4 million) at auction, setting a new European record for the highest-priced artwork ever sold. The masterpiece was sold on Tuesday at Sotheby’s in London after an intense 10-minute bidding war, with a hammer price of £74 million ($94.35 million). The final figure includes a buyer’s premium charge on top of the sale price.
The sale price greatly surpassed the initial estimate of £65 million ($80 million) and surpassed the previous European auction record of $104.3 million (£65 million at the time), which was achieved by Alberto Giacometti’s sculpture “Walking Man I” at Sotheby’s in 2010. Prior to this, the most expensive painting sold at a European auction was Claude Monet’s “Le Bassin aux Nymphéas,” which fetched $80.4 million at a Christie’s sale in 2008.
“Dame mit Fächer” is the last portrait completed by Gustav Klimt before his death in 1918. The painting portrays an unidentified woman against a captivating backdrop influenced by Chinese art, featuring dragons and lotus blossoms. It was last sold in 1994 for $11.6 million at an auction in New York.
Sotheby’s revealed that the buyer of the painting was art adviser Patti Wong, acting on behalf of a collector from Hong Kong. The auction house described the atmosphere during the auction as rare and noted the ten-minute bidding battle among four clients on the phone and in the room.
With his bold and daring art nouveau style, Gustav Klimt was a prominent figure in artistic modernism at the turn of the 20th century. His works have consistently commanded high prices, and his painting “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II” sold for $87.9 million in 2006, while “Birch Forest” sold for $104.6 million at Christie’s in New York last year. It is also reported that two other Klimt portraits have been sold privately for over $100 million.
Although the overall record for an artwork sold at auction is held by Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi,” which fetched $450.3 million in 2017, some experts have questioned the extent of the Renaissance master’s involvement in the painting of Jesus Christ.
