Gustav Klimt’s Final Masterpiece Smashes Record for Any Auction in Europe

The sale was a big win for Sotheby’s and also signaled the continued strength of the market for Klimt’s work. The ultimate price topped his previous auction high, set in November for the 1903 landscape Birch Forest, which achieved $105 million at Christie’s in New York as part of the blockbuster Paul Allen sale.

The work, which was said to be still in progress on the artist’s easel when he died, depicts an unidentified young woman clutching a fan, set against a decorative backdrop of lush Asian textiles. The painting had been in the same collection since 1994, when it was last bought at auction for just $11 million. The price was a record for the artist and was the highest paid for a public sale in Europe, a record previously held by Alberto Giacometti’s Walking Man I (1960) which sold for $104 million in 2010, also at Sotheby’s in London.

It is not the first time that the Viennese artist has made bold headlines in the media. A leader of the Viennese-Succession movement, Klimt has long been admired and appreciated, with his beguiling representations of women making him one of the most celebrated painter of the female portrait in the early 20th century. But it was in 2006 that his market reached new heights, when New York collector Ronald S. Lauder paid $135 million in a private sale for the 1907 portrait Adele Bloch-Bauer I. In 2016, Oprah Winfrey sold her Gustav Klimt painting Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II (1912), also privately, to a Chinese buyer for $150 million, which represented a near-doubling of the work’s price, just 10 years after she bought it for $87.9 million.

One reason for the high prices is simply the rarity of his works: Klimt only painted around 250 pieces over the course of his whole life, most of which are now in museums. His work also tends to appeal to Asian collectors, thanks to way he often blurs the lines between decorative and fine art, painting and drawing. That scarcity, combined with growing demand from Asian collectors, has pushed the demand even higher.

“The appearance of this major work at auction marks an important moment for the market,” says Newman.”Not only is the painting the most valuable ever to have been offered at auction in Europe, it also now joins the ranks of the most valuable portraits—of any era—ever to have come to auction.”