do you like Klimt? I actually saw this one in Vienna
artdreamguide.com
Washington/Vienna - Modern master Gustav Klimt's 'Golden Adele' has been sold in the United States for 135 million dollars following its restitution by Austria to the heirs of its original Jewish owner, according to the New York Times.
The report said the heirs had sold the painting, otherwise known as 'Adele Bloch-Bauer I' to Ronald Lauder, a billionaire Estee Lauder heir and the former ambassador to Austria.
The quoted purchase price of 135 million dollars would make it the most expensive picture in history. The previous record holder was Picasso's 'Boy with a Pipe' sold at Sotheby's for 104.1 million dollars in 2004.
Official sources neither confirmed nor denied the report.
The paper said the portrait, painted by Klimt in 1907, was acquired by Lauder for the New Gallery in Manhattan. In a statement, the purchaser said the museum would be 'inestimably enriched.'
New Gallery director Renee Price said that as a born Viennese, she had had the good fortune to see the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer often during the decades when it hung in Vienna's Belvedere Palace.
'This painting is as important for the New Gallery as the Mona Lisa for the Louvre,' she said.
The 'Golden Adele' and four other Klimt paintings were restored by Austria to their rightful heirs after long legal wrangling.
Originally, the paintings by Klimt (1862-1918) were the property of Adele Bloch-Bauer. When she died in 1925, she left them in her will with all her other property to her husband, Jewish sugar industrialist Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer.
In her will was a clause asking her husband to leave the paintings to Austrian museums on his death.
However, at the end of the 1930's, he was forced to flee from the Nazis in Austria to Switzerland, where he wrote a will leaving the paintings to his own family before dying in 1946.
His closest living relative is his niece Maria Altmann, now aged 90 and living in Los Angeles.
Lawyers later argued that in the mid-1920's, Adele Bloch-Bauer could not have known that her family would be persecuted by the Nazis. Otherwise she would never have asked that the pictures go to Austrian museums.
The Klimt pictures remained in Austria for six decades after the war, and were the centrepiece of the Austrian Gallery at the Upper Belvedere Palace until their transfer to the US this year.
re Ireland - I met an Irishman in Atlanta - he told me Kilkenny was a party city - have you been to Ireland?
I'll be around the Cork area the 24th, 25th, 26th & 27th [clean living :] |
