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SALE STORY

Spring arrived early at Sotheby’s this year when a flower landscape by Gustav Klimt sold for £48m. ALICE HANCOCK discovers why this lesser-known work beat bidding records

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When Klimt’s Bauerngart­en sold for £ 48m, it became the third most expensive artwork to sell in Europe

When Klimt first exhibited Bauerngart­en, the dazzling and exuberant landscape of flowers that he painted in 1907, critics credited the painting with a mystical power. ‘The flower meadows are even more beautiful since Klimt has painted them,’ said one.

On the chilly evening of 1st March this year, it seemed that little had changed. The audience at Sotheby’s much-touted Impression­ist and Modern Art sale in London were similarly awestruck. Bauerngart­en was the headline lot, and as it was placed behind the rostrum, a hush fell.

Bauerngart­en had been announced for sale just one month before, two days after a report had revealed that Oprah Winfrey had sold Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch- Bauer II for $150m in a private sale. ‘ It was pure coincidenc­e,’ says Simon Stock, Sotheby’s senior internatio­nal specialist of Impression­ist and Modern Art, who worked on the sale of the Klimt and was there at its unveiling in Hong Kong. ‘But that and the excitement that Bauerngart­en caused shows what appetite there is for Klimt.’

The show was certainly on in London. Helena Newman, chairman of Sotheby’s Europe who was manning the rostrum, wore a purple dress chosen especially to complement the violet zinnias in the painting’s foreground. When the hammer came down after heated bidding from four telephone bidders, applause broke out. At £48m the Klimt had become the third most expensive artwork ever sold in Europe (behind Alberto Giacometti’s Walking Man sculpture and Rubens’ Massacre of the Innocents).

Say ‘Klimt’ and most tend to think of the shimmering mosaic-like, and often erotic, canvases of his so- called ‘golden period’. Bauerngart­en, though painted at the same time, is neither a figurative work nor has a speck of gold on it. So what is its particular appeal?

‘ The completely non- o ensive subject matter and the fabulous condition of the piece made it highly desirable,’ says Stock. ‘ It had no lining, no flattening of the impasto, no varnish on it. It looked almost as if Klimt had just put his paintbrush­es down.’

Klimt started his career as a painter of interiors and murals. Born the son of a gold engraver in 1862, he enrolled aged 14 into the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts where he studied architectu­ral painting until 1883. Upon graduation, he went into business with his brother Ernst and a friend, creating largescale murals and decorative panels for many of the buildings along Vienna’s illustriou­s Ringstrass­e. These included the Kunsthisto­risches Museum and the Burgtheate­r, for which he won a Gold Order of Merit from the Austrian emperor Franz Josef.

A change of style In 1892 both Klimt’s father and Ernst died, a double tragedy that sent Klimt seeking more personal artistic expression. It fed into his participat­ion in the founding of the Vienna Secession, a movement that was tired of the traditions of academic art so sought to broaden the horizons of the Viennese cultural scene by exhibiting the work of other European artists, and promoting young Austrian artists.

He continued to paint large public works (to varying reviews – three paintings commission­ed to decorate the Great Hall of Vienna University in 1894 were decried as ‘pornograph­ic’) but began to seek increasing solace on the shores of Lake Attersee, which is today a three-hour drive west of Vienna.

Klimt spent many summer months during the late 1890s and early 1900s at the Villa Oleander with his mistress Emilie Flöge, a well-known Austrian fashion designer. Klimt would reportedly arrive from the city and change straight away from his city suit into floor-length robes before setting about painting or studying the books of Japanese art and prints, fashionabl­e at the time, that he avidly collected. Allegedly he felt so free that he did not even put on underwear.

‘Klimt’s portraits were commission­s by the elite intelligen­tsia of Vienna,’ says Ann Dumas, curator of the Royal Academy’s 2016 show Painting the Modern Garden, in which Bauerngart­en was exhibited. ‘ The garden was a subject for him to paint purely for his own enjoyment. He even created his own.’

In the Royal Academy show, Bauerngart­en was displayed alongside works by Van Gogh, Matisse and Emil Nolde in a room named Avant Garden, which displayed artists’ use of gardens as a vehicle for their own heightened personal expression. Prior to this the painting had last been seen in public in 1994, when it was sold at Christie’s for what now seems a rather modest £3.7m.

For curator and Klimt expert Alfred Weidinger, who lectured in front of Bauerngart­en ahead of the Christie’s auction, the lack of restrictio­n is what makes Klimt’s landscapes so particular­ly beautiful. ‘ Klimt painted these without pressure from his clients, because at Attersee they didn’t exist. He loved solitude and his landscapes are painted in this mood, which makes them very personal and therefore important.’

The brilliance of Bauerngart­en Despite the freedom that Klimt found with the impasto paint which he used to capture the barrage of foliage and petals, up close it is possible to see the considerat­ion behind every daub of colour. ‘ Bauerngart­en is still a traditiona­l picture,’ says Weidinger. ‘ It has an intentiona­lly artisan e ect and looks like a painted mosaic. This was very Viennese. It is a masterpiec­e of the Austrian art nouveau.’

Alive and beautiful though Bauerngart­en is – one contempora­ry critic describes the piece as being like ‘a firework display of summer heat’ – Klimt was not as appreciate­d in his lifetime as he is now. His star rose again in the 1960s, alongside a love for decorative mysticism and interest in art nouveau, and it has been rising ever since.

‘ Klimt’s art speaks internatio­nally,’ says Simon Stock. ‘ It is positive and uplifting. Like Monet he was painting before the problemati­c histories of the world wars and his subject matter reflects that.’ Stock also says that Klimt’s paintings are made even more desirable by their rarity. ‘ Klimt was a perfection­ist and agonised over his pieces, so there are not many around.’

The most desirable are the portraits, as the Oprah Winfrey sale shows, which is why the Bauerngart­en result is all the more remarkable. ‘ I was a bit surprised,’ admits Ann Dumas about the winning bid. ‘ It did fetch a large sum, but then it’s a very beautiful painting.’

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 ??  ?? ABOVE The identity of the sitter in Girl in the
Foliage (1896) is still unknown BELOW LEFT Art nouveau, symbolism and Byzantine styles are brought together by Klimt in The Kiss (1907–1908)
ABOVE The identity of the sitter in Girl in the Foliage (1896) is still unknown BELOW LEFT Art nouveau, symbolism and Byzantine styles are brought together by Klimt in The Kiss (1907–1908)

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