Estimated At $80 Million, Gustav Klimt’s ‘Lady With A Fan’ Can Bring A Record At Sotheby’s On June 27

Sotheby’s has pulled together a cuvee of spectacular modern and contemporary gems for its June 27 headline summer sale in London, including Lucien Freud’s Night Interior, estimated to fetch $15.2 million, Monet’s L’eglise de Vernon (The Church of Vernon), thought to have the muscle to call forth $7.6 million, among a host of others. The estimates are by turn sober, but heady in some way under closer study, and in the distinctly well-mannered way of auction houses, they’re meant only as rough suggestions rather than directives to the artists’ markets, but this sale has a generous sort of forward magnetism to it, and, despite the economic malaise brought to the Continent and the world by Vladimir Putin’s war, optimism for what happens as the gavel falls on the podium in London on the evening of the 27 June is well-placed. The palette of offerings, and the field of artists, is strong.

The premier lot in the sale is Lot 125, Gustav Klimt’s luminescent, ground-breaking Dame mit Faecher (Lady With A Fan), 1918, estimated to wring a high of some $80 million from the air. It is an astounding work, mostly because it offers a such grand clear bridge, much as Cezanne and Manet did in France, from the 19th century into the classic modern period. This is what makes Sotheby’s initially eye-watering $80-million high estimate for tomorrow night’s action actually rather conservative. Pictured below, the painting was found still being worked on in 1918, as the painter died. It is nothing less than a finished masterpiece, unfinished only in its author’s eyes.

Klimt comes by this bridge-building role honestly. In late-19th century Vienna, he was the towering bad boy of the haute- and the demimonde in the Habsburg Empire’s fin-de-siècle bachannal, and in the blazingly swift dozen years on the Continent prior to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand at the outbreak of World War I. Klimt was not of his time, rather, he appeared more or less out of nowhere, fully modern in his thought — much like his contemporary Einstein at the dawn of the 20th century.

Pictured only occasionally in a salon-ready suit, although usually a pretty good one, by mid-career the bearded, promethean wild man preferred wearing caftans, drank like a Danube river longshoreman and slept with as many of his ravishingly gorgeous models as he possibly could, predictably seeding, as the Viennese historians count it, “at least” six children with three different women throughout Viennese society. Ragingly innovative and even latterly surreal on canvas, he bullied and stretched the anachronistic boundaries of Central European “academy” art into unknown shapes, and as such, he was the perfect father-figure creator of what became Vienna’s storied bunch of artistic rebels, the Secession, in 1897.

By the end of World War I, Klimt was blazing further trails. Lady With A Fan was one of two paintings found on easels — in other words, still in the works — in his studio at the time of his untimely death in 1918, which is just one of the reasons why its importance as an architectural element of the bridge Klimt built into modern art can, almost, not be overstated. By 1917, Klimt had long fallen in love with Asian art and tapestry, and in particular with the otherworldly designs in painting, ceramics and fabric emanating from Japanese masters. As well, though he was merely in his fifties, his headlong life was coming to its natural end, and the painter’s long romantic-then-platonic relationship with the seminal Viennese ‘reform’ salon leader, fashion designer and women’s rights advocate Emilie Flöge was in full flower. In Klimt’s circle, Ms. Flöge outlasted all of Klimt’s dozens of infatuations with other Viennese beauties and, in essence, became a trusted intellectual companion and muse.

Klimt did over 20 designs for Ms. Flöge’s dresses, which became all the rage as her massive business took off. Her family was of long acquaintance with that of Klimt — Emilie’s sister and business partner Helene was married to Klimt’s brother Ernst, and she first met Klimt in 1891.

Uncertainties persist as to the identity of the transcendent for Lady With A Fan — which is a diplomatic way of saying that, as rendered in full erotic flower in the Asian robe by Klimt, pretty much everybody since the painting was found on its easel in his studio in 1918 has been raging with curiosity and theories about who she was. Though she may not lead the list, Flöge is certainly among the likely suspects — certainly the sitter’s dark, perfectly wild curls of fabulously disheveled bedroom-hair are similar to that of Flöge, as well as the expression of deeply self-aware comfort with and in herself. Arguing against that down through the years is the fact that, as pictured, the model is much younger-in-the-moment, at the time of sitting, than Flöge would have been in 1918 — Ms. Flöge was born in 1874 and in 1918 would have turned 44.

The artistic and financial value of the painting lies in these qualities of the sitter, rendered with such specific, delineated and expressive results by Klimt. It is surprising, for a painting with such a beloved following, that Lady With A Fan has been only rarely on loan over the last half-century. Which is another way of saying, whomever finds him or herself in possession of the painting tends to want to live with it.

The phoenix, or firebird, on the Japanese silk draped behind the model does literally seem as if it emanates from her head. The bird is an expression of her power and her thought, Klimt is telling us. Her gaze is one for the ages, self assured, ready for whatever the world brings next. It’s in stark contrast, and somehow amplified by, her nakedness — she’s draped, but only nominally, in one of Klimt’s trademark robes. What does she make of her robe? Not much — some nominal form of comfort against the chill of the studio, perhaps, and she is letting it fall off the shoulder anyway.

The painting’s provenance is stellar, having passed through the hands of legendary Viennese collector and museum founder Rudolf Leopold (of Vienna’s Museum Leopold), and it would have been a most natural fit for the Leopold collection — which already spectacularly features Egon Schiele’s Portrait of Wally (Walburga Neuzil), from 1912. But Leopold sold Lady With A Fan in 1991, in an effort to assemble the funds to build his eponymous museum, now the central attraction in Vienna’s wildly popular 970,000-square-foot Museums Quartier. The current owner whose estate has consigned the painting to be sold remains anonymous, but there exists a shard of hope that the successful buyer tomorrow evening will be an institutional one, so that all of the accomplishments of the painter and his sitter in carrying and opening the 19th century into the 20th remain with us.

Klimt comes by this bridge-building role honestly. In late-19th century Vienna, he was the towering bad boy of the haute- and the demimonde in the Habsburg Empire’s fin-de-siècle bachannal, and in the blazingly swift dozen years on the Continent prior to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand at the outbreak of World War I. Klimt was not of his time, rather, he appeared more or less out of nowhere, fully modern in his thought — much like his contemporary Einstein at the dawn of the 20th century.

Pictured only occasionally in a salon-ready suit, although usually a pretty good one, by mid-career the bearded, promethean wild man preferred wearing caftans, drank like a Danube river longshoreman and slept with as many of his ravishingly gorgeous models as he possibly could, predictably seeding, as the Viennese historians count it, “at least” six children with three different women throughout Viennese society. Ragingly innovative and even latterly surreal on canvas, he bullied and stretched the anachronistic boundaries of Central European “academy” art into unknown shapes, and as such, he was the perfect father-figure creator of what became Vienna’s storied bunch of artistic rebels, the Secession, in 1897.

By the end of World War I, Klimt was blazing further trails. Lady With A Fan was one of two paintings found on easels — in other words, still in the works — in his studio at the time of his untimely death in 1918, which is just one of the reasons why its importance as an architectural element of the bridge Klimt built into modern art can, almost, not be overstated. By 1917, Klimt had long fallen in love with Asian art and tapestry, and in particular with the otherworldly designs in painting, ceramics and fabric emanating from Japanese masters. As well, though he was merely in his fifties, his headlong life was coming to its natural end, and the painter’s long romantic-then-platonic relationship with the seminal Viennese ‘reform’ salon leader, fashion designer and women’s rights advocate Emilie Flöge was in full flower. In Klimt’s circle, Ms. Flöge outlasted all of Klimt’s dozens of infatuations with other Viennese beauties and, in essence, became a trusted intellectual companion and muse.

Klimt did over 20 designs for Ms. Flöge’s dresses, which became all the rage as her massive business took off. Her family was of long acquaintance with that of Klimt — Emilie’s sister and business partner Helene was married to Klimt’s brother Ernst, and she first met Klimt in 1891.

Uncertainties persist as to the identity of the transcendent for Lady With A Fan — which is a diplomatic way of saying that, as rendered in full erotic flower in the Asian robe by Klimt, pretty much everybody since the painting was found on its easel in his studio in 1918 has been raging with curiosity and theories about who she was. Though she may not lead the list, Flöge is certainly among the likely suspects — certainly the sitter’s dark, perfectly wild curls of fabulously disheveled bedroom-hair are similar to that of Flöge, as well as the expression of deeply self-aware comfort with and in herself. Arguing against that down through the years is the fact that, as pictured, the model is much younger-in-the-moment, at the time of sitting, than Flöge would have been in 1918 — Ms. Flöge was born in 1874 and in 1918 would have turned 44.

The artistic and financial value of the painting lies in these qualities of the sitter, rendered with such specific, delineated and expressive results by Klimt. It is surprising, for a painting with such a beloved following, that Lady With A Fan has been only rarely on loan over the last half-century. Which is another way of saying, whomever finds him or herself in possession of the painting tends to want to live with it.

The phoenix, or firebird, on the Japanese silk draped behind the model does literally seem as if it emanates from her head. The bird is an expression of her power and her thought, Klimt is telling us. Her gaze is one for the ages, self assured, ready for whatever the world brings next. It’s in stark contrast, and somehow amplified by, her nakedness — she’s draped, but only nominally, in one of Klimt’s trademark robes. What does she make of her robe? Not much — some nominal form of comfort against the chill of the studio, perhaps, and she is letting it fall off the shoulder anyway.

The painting’s provenance is stellar, having passed through the hands of legendary Viennese collector and museum founder Rudolf Leopold (of Vienna’s Museum Leopold), and it would have been a most natural fit for the Leopold collection — which already spectacularly features Egon Schiele’s Portrait of Wally (Walburga Neuzil), from 1912. But Leopold sold Lady With A Fan in 1991, in an effort to assemble the funds to build his eponymous museum, now the central attraction in Vienna’s wildly popular 970,000-square-foot Museums Quartier. The current owner whose estate has consigned the painting to be sold remains anonymous, but there exists a shard of hope that the successful buyer tomorrow evening will be an institutional one, so that all of the accomplishments of the painter and his sitter in carrying and opening the 19th century into the 20th remain with us.