
Gustav Klimt’s 1907 masterpiece, a portrait of Vienna aristocrat Adele Bloch-Bauer, was sold to cosmetics magnate Ronald S. Lauder (the heir to the Estee Lauder fortune) for $135 million the highest known price ever paid for a painting.
Purchased for the Neue Galerie in Manhattan Klimt’s portrait deposed Picasso’s 1905 “Boy With a Pipe” sold two years ago,in an auction at Sotheby’s for $104 million.
“It is a once-in-a-lifetime acquisition,” said Lauder, the founder of the Neue Galerie, a tiny Manhattan museum devoted entirely to German and Austrian art.
Klimt, an Austrian Symbolist painter, is known as one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Art Nouveau movement.
His major works include paintings, murals, sketches and other art objects. He’s primary subject is the female body, and his works are marked by a frank eroticism.
Art Nouveau - “An international style of decoration and architecture which developed in the 1880s and 1890s. The name derives from the Maison de l’Art Nouveau, an interior design gallery opened in Paris in 1896, but in fact the movement had different names throughout Europe. In Germany it was known as ‘Jugendstil’, from the magazine Diejugend (Youth) published from 1896; in Italy ‘Stile Liberty’ (after the London store, Liberty Style) or ‘Floreale’; in Spain ‘Modernista’, in Austria ‘Sezessionstil’ and, paradoxically, in France the English term ‘Modern Style’ was often used, emphasizing the English origins of the movement.
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