Gustav Klimt - Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I 1907
Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I 1907
138x138cm oil/canvas
Sold for: USD 135.0 million
Auction house: Private sale via Christie's
Sale date: 18 June 2006
Seller: Maria Altmann
Buyer: Ronald Lauder, Neue Galerie
From Christies.com :
The mesmerising radiance of Adele Bloch-Bauer’s gaze in Gustav Klimt’s gold-flecked 1907 portrait of her provides no hint of the turbulent fate that lay in store for the painting. Commissioned by her sugar-industrialist husband Ferdinand, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I took Klimt three years to create, and was completed amid speculation that the Austrian artist and his high-society subject were lovers. Following Adele’s death in 1925 from meningitis, the masterpiece remained in the Bloch-Bauers’ Vienna townhouse until the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938. Targeted amid the Nazis’ cultural looting spree, it was one of five Klimt paintings taken from the Bloch-Bauer residence, with the pictures ending up in Vienna’s Belvedere Gallery. Ferdinand died in exile in Switzerland in 1945.