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Who’s the hottest artist on the private market? According to Bloomberg’s Katya Kazakina it’s Gustav Klimt who has seen two of his works sell on the private market recently for $320m.
Here’s what Kazakina reported:Continue Reading
Bloomberg’s Scott Reyburn and Catherine Hickley tell the story behind one of Gustav Klimt’s last portraits which will be auctioned in London at Christie’s at the end of the month. The low estimate is £14m:
The work was one of three commissioned by Aranka Munk, the wife of a Viennese industrialist, after the death of her daughter Ria in 1911. Ria committed suicide at the age of 24 because of an unhappy love affair. […] The 7-foot-high (2.1 meter) canvas shows the dark-haired, rosy-cheeked Ria with her body in profile, her face turned toward the viewer, standing surrounded by abstract swirls of color. It was left incomplete in Klimt’s studio when the artist died in 1918. […] “The face is very finished, while the dress and other parts aren’t,” Bertazzoni said. “This is a portrait of a dead person and it almost looks as if she’s slipping away.” The painting was seized from the Munk family by the National Socialists during World War II and subsequently passed into the collection of the Neue Galerie der Stadt in Linz, Austria, now known as the Lentos Museum.Continue Reading
Jonathan Jones thinks the Austrian sex club set up to celebrate the renovation of Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze is a fitting tribute. Indeed, he worries that we’ve let the sex and shock drain out of Klimt:
Nothing the Austrian swingers get up to here – visitors to the Frieze have to walk through a temporary sex club – would have shocked Klimt, or, for that matter, his contemporary Sigmund Freud. These makers of fin-de-siècle Vienna were completely uninhibited. But it’s probably true that Klimt has become so acceptable and popular that an injection of perversity to awaken visitors to the danger and daring of one of his great works is a timely idea.Continue Reading
Peter Aspden in the Financial Times details the path to auction that this Gustav Klimt painting took to satisfy a restitution claim. With $90m in works sold at Sotheby’s alone in 2009, restitution has become a fruitful vineyard for the auction houses:
Sotheby’s is offering “Church in Cassone” for sale early next month at its London auction house. It estimates that the painting will be sold for £12m to £18m, a hefty amount for sure, although one that seems curiously muted considering some of the prices realised during the art market’s extended pre-credit crunch bubble, which made multimillionaires of the likes of Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons.Continue Reading
