Sultry Klimt portrait makes £85.3m in London, becoming the most expensive work to sell at auction in Europe

To some fanfare however little shock, the final portrait ever painted by Gustav Klimt has bought for a file public sale value in Europe, fetching £85.3m (with charges) at Sotheby’s Fashionable and up to date artwork night sale in London this night (27 June).

Dame mit Fächer (Woman with a Fan) (1917), executed a yr earlier than Klimt died in 1918, made headlines when its consignment was introduced earlier this month: its estimate, “in extra of £65m”, was the best of any work provided at public sale within the UK and in Europe. Assured by each an irrevocable bid and a third-party assure, it was positive to promote. And so it did, hammering at £74m to the well-known adviser Patti Wong—previously chairperson of Sotheby’s Asia—bidding reside within the New Bond Avenue salesroom on behalf of a Hong Kong-based consumer.

Offering some welcome punctuation to a thus-far largely flat public sale that has seen skinny bidding and plenty of works handed or bought beneath estimate, the Klimt acquired preliminary consideration from two bidders within the room and two extra on the telephones. The four-step shortly changed into a two-way tussle between the customer and the underbidder, liaising on the cellphone with Sotheby’s Asia deputy chairman Jen Hua. After a heated ten minutes steered by auctioneer Helena Newman, Sotheby’s chairman for Europe and worldwide head of Impressionist and Fashionable artwork, the underbidder dropped out of the race at £73.5m.

The Klimt portray surpasses the earlier title holder of Europe’s costliest work bought at public sale—Alberto Giacometti’s 1961 sculpture L’Homme Qui Marche I, which made £65m (with charges) at Sotheby’s London in 2010. Historic public sale information usually are not adjusted for inflation, nor fluctuations in forex energy.

Depicting a lady together with her kimono slipping off her shoulder, the sultry record-breaking portrait is “Klimt experimenting and pushing the boundaries”, Newman says. Sotheby’s final bought this portray virtually 30 years in the past, in 1994, for $11.6m (with charges), as a part of the gathering of Wendell Cherry, the American entrepreneur and artwork collector. It was consigned by the identical household who purchased it in 1994; Sotheby’s didn’t disclose their cause for promoting it.

Klimt’s public sale file stands at $104.5m, achieved at Christie’s New York for the 1902 portray Birch Forest, which got here from the Paul G Allen’s assortment.

Woman with a Fan is tonight’s star lot and accounts for round one third of the Fashionable and up to date night public sale’s £155.5m to £197.5m pre-sale estimate (all pre-sale estimates are calculated with out charges). This public sale additionally sees the launch of a brand new sub-sales class—Face Off—specializing in portraits from the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty first centuries.

However past the headline-grabbing Klimt, choices from tonight are significantly extra pedestrian, with simply two different eight-figure heaps coming to the block, each with £8m to £12m estimates: Cy Twombly’s Untitled (1970) and a nude portrait by Lucian Freud of one in every of his most essential sitters, Penny Cuthbertson.

The Fashionable and up to date night public sale was preceded by The Now sale, that includes 14 works made on this century, many by rising market stars comparable to Julien Nguyen and Caroline Walker, in addition to extra established names like Günther Förg and Mark Bradford. That sale achieved £8.7m (together with charges) towards an estimate of £6.6m to £9.9m; three heaps have been withdrawn and one was handed. Whereas new public sale information have been set for Arthur Jafa and Michel Majerus, hammer costs at ten instances the estimates weren’t seen, as has beforehand been the case for this class.

This text is reporting on an ongoing sale and will probably be up to date.