Ringing In $108 Million At Sotheby’s, Gustav Klimt’s ‘Lady With A Fan’ Becomes Europe’s Most Expensive Painting Ever Sold At Auction

It took some work from Sotheby’s brightly-clad auctioneer, two banks of Sotheby’s salespeople manning the lines connecting to buyers around the world, and a breathless room of people brimming and murmuring throughout the seemingly interminable eleven-plus rather cliff-hanging minutes that it took the gavel to fall. But in the end it paid off, and handsomely: Klimt’s luminescent and thoroughly modern Dame mit Faecher (Lady With A Fan), 1918, went for $108.4 million to art advisor Patti Wong acting for a Hong Kong buyer, according to Sotheby’s, making it Europe’s current most expensive painting ever sold at auction.

Klimt’s work in general and Lady With A Fan in particular have come by this record-breaking moment honestly — the artist has been hitting the stratosphere since his Portrait of Adele Block-Bauer sold in New York for $87 million and change in 2006.

Although Adele was a quite the Viennese society figure and a figure in Klimt’s life, Klimt poured everything he had to say about where his version of early modernism was headed into Lady With A Fan. Obviously, as he worked the painting over the course of 1917-8 as the Habsburg Empire itself collapsed at the end of World War 1, Klimt didn’t know that it would be his last work, which makes it all the more poignant, but that fact aside, this painting serves as a bright beacon held up by the all-too-mortal Klimt, casting its beam forward into the flowering of modern art in the 20th century. He was at the peak of his powers when he died. He wrestled his imagery almost to the point of 20th-century abstraction, and it is the tension between that, and the more classical representative forms of the late-19th, that gives his work its depth and reach. Had he been given the years, whatever he could have produced after Lady With A Fan would have been splendid.

And it appears that the bidders in Sotheby’s London rooms on Tuesday evening seemed to agree with that.