Klimt Paintings Are Expected To Sell for $140 Million

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The New York Sun

LONDON — Christie’s International said it will auction four Gustav Klimt paintings owned by heirs of a Nazi victim for as much as $140 million in New York on November 8. The pictures will be part of a $330 million sale of Impressionist and modern art, Christie’s biggest ever. The most expensive Klimt is a portrait of a Viennese art patron and wife of a Jewish sugar industrialist, Adele Bloch-Bauer, valued between $40 million and $60 million, Christie’s said in a statement. Three landscapes have combined estimates of $53 million to $80 million.

The art boom has swelled business for auction houses and is bringing out sellers who may be expecting prices to decline as the world economy slows. Other works for sale come from collections by Andrew Lloyd Webber, Paul Mellon, Johnny Carson, and Otto Preminger.

“The addition of these four powerful artworks in our November sale will make it Christie’s New York’s most important auction ever,” the auction house’s New York-based president, Marc Porter, said in the statement.

The cosmetics magnate Ronald Lauder bought a fifth Klimt work recovered by the Bloch-Bauer heirs and known as “Golden Adele” for $135 million in June. It is on display with the other four Klimts through October 9 at New York’s Neue Galerie, which Mr. Lauder co-founded.

London-based Christie’s, which is owned by the French billionaire Francois Pinault, may have initially sought private buyers for the four Klimts. In August, Christie’s said it had been hired by the heirs and might sell them privately.

Christie’s has set top prices for many German and Austrian artists. In November, it will offer Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s painting of a Berlin street scene, returned by the German city to heirs of a Jewish family who owned it before World War II, for as much as $25 million. The world’s largest auction house had sales of $3.2 billion in 2005, an increase of 38% from a year earlier.

The Bloch-Bauer paintings, stolen by the Nazis in 1938, previously hung in Vienna’s Belvedere museum. They were restored in January to California’s Maria Altmann and other heirs after a court fight with the Austrian government. Adele Bloch-Bauer may have been Klimt’s mistress, the Neue Galerie said.

Mr. Lauder’s 1907 “Adele Bloch-Bauer I,” painted with gold in the background and fabric of Adele’s dress after Klimt saw Ravenna’s Byzantine mosaics, cost more than any painting sold at auction. Pablo Picasso’s “Dora Maar au Chat” sold for $95.2 million in May in New York, about 9% less than a Picasso work that went for $104.2 million in 2004.

Klimt’s auction record was set in 2003 when a landscape, “Landhaus am Attersee,” raised $29.1 million. A Klimt painting of birch trees sold in 2004 for $3.7 million. Portraits usually command higher prices. Klimt, who died in 1918, may be best known for “The Kiss.” Ornamental layouts, golden backgrounds, and eroticism are his trademarks.


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