2023-06-14 16:26:18
Sotheby’s will put it up for sale on June 27 ‘Lady with a fan’ a work that is not only the star of London’s summer auction season, but also one of the finest and most valuable works of art ever offered in Europe. Part with an estimated price of about 80 million dollars. Still on the easel in Gustav Klimt’s studio at the time of the artist’s unexpected and untimely death in February 1918, ‘Lady with a Fan’, a beautiful and seductive portrait of a nameless woman, brings together all the technical skill and exuberance creativity that define the greatest work of the Austrian painter.
The last portrait Klimt painted is also among his best works, created when he was still in his artistic heyday, and at a time when the ‘formality’ of his earlier commissioned work is giving way to a new expressiveness, an increasingly immersive deeper and more joyous in pattern, color, and form, than, though clearly influenced by his contemporaries (Van Gogh, Matisse y Gauguin), became something completely different in his hands.
While the earlier works of the famous ‘golden period‘ by Klimt -led by the iconic ‘Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I’, from 1907- see their sitter presented as an icon, amid a tapestry of golden shapes, here the sitter almost dissolves into the background: the soft pattern of woman’s skin repeated on the pale yellow background.
Klimt began work on ‘Lady with a Fan’ in 1917, by which time he was among the most celebrated portrait painters in Europe: commissions came in plentiful and fast, for which he was able to fetch far higher prices than any of his contemporaries. But this was a work painted entirely in pursuit of his own interests. Full of freedom and spontaneity, it reflects Klimt’s joy in painting it and in celebrating beauty in its purest form. It also reveals your innovative approach. Traditionally, portraits were, and still are, painted in a vertical format. Here, Klimt returns to square format which he used for his avant-garde landscapes at the turn of the century, giving this painting a unique modern twist.
Klimt here too gives full expression to his complete fascination with Chinese and Japanese art and culture. Sumptuous silk kimonos and Chinese robes are known to have been his favorite clothing, and his home abounded with beautiful objects from the Orient. Egon Schiele, a regular visitor, describes it this way: “The room was furnished with a square table in the middle and a large number of Japanese prints covering the walls… and from there to another room whose wall was entirely covered by a huge wardrobe, which contained his marvelous collection of Chinese and Japanese robes.
In ‘Lady with a fan’, Klimt is mainly inspired by Chinese motifs: the phoenix (symbol of immortality and rebirth, good fortune and fidelity) and lotus flowers (symbols of love, happy marriage, purity). Meanwhile, his flattening of the background and juxtaposition of patterns reflects his deep interest in Japanese woodblock prints.
‘Lady with a Fan’ (left), on the easel in Gustav Klimt’s studio
The painting was acquired shortly after Klimt’s death by the Viennese industrialist Erwin Boehler. The Böhlers (including Erwin’s brother Heinrich and his cousin Hans) were close friends and patrons of both Klimt and Egon Schiele. They spent their holidays with Gustav Klimt in Attersee, a lake near Salzburg that was the inspiration for many of the artist’s most important landscapes and can be seen together in photographs. In 1916, Erwin bought the Litzelberg, a small lake island immortalized in Klimt’s paintings. Erwin Böhler commissioned the prominent architect Josef Hoffmann to decorate the rooms of his apartment in the Dumba Palace in Vienna, where the painting hung in the Music Room along with some Klimt landscapes that were also part of his collection. The work eventually passed to Heinrich and then, after his death in 1940, to Heinrich’s wife, Mabel.
In 1967 it was in the collection of Rudolf Leopold, who is known to have purchased a large group of Schiele’s drawings from Mabel Böhler in 1952 and may have purchased this work from her as well. ‘Woman with a Fan’ was put up for auction for the last time almost thirty years ago, in 1994, when it was acquired at Sotheby’s by the family of the current owner. Your price then: $11.6 million, which was a new record for Klimt. The painting was exhibited at the Viewpoint of Viennaalong with other late Klimt masterpieces.
Thomas Boyd Bowman, head of evening sales for Impressionist and Modern Art at Sotheby’s London, says: “Beauty and sensuality of the portrait lies in the details: the flecks of blue and pink that enliven the sitter’s skin, the soft lines of her lashes, and the pursed lips that give character to her face. Klimt here gave himself complete freedom to capture on canvas a woman of a devastating beauty. Her provocatively bare shoulder, his poise and quiet self-assurance combine to startling effect.”
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