Klimt oil painting is sold for record £48m
A PAINTING by Gustav Klimt has become the third most expensive artwork ever sold in Europe, after fetching a record price of nearly £48 million at auction.
Bauerngarten became the Austrian symbolist’s highest-priced landscape workwhenitwassnappedup for £47,971,250.
The canvas, depicting an “informal profusion of poppies, daisies and roses”, went under the hammer as part of a record-breaking sale totalling nearly £20m at Sotheby’s auction house on Wednesday.
The Klimt follows Alberto Giacometti’s Walking Man (£65,001,250 in 2010) and Peter Paul Rubens’ The Massacre Of The Innocents (£49,506,648 in 2002) in the list of the three most expensive works sold in Europe.
Helena Newman, chairman of Sotheby’s Europe, said: “The star of this season’s offering is undoubtedly Klimt’s luminous Bauerngarten, dating from the artist’s much-loved golden period and from the same year as his famous Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I. Innovative in its composition and jewel-like in its exquisite blaze of colours, it is one of the artist’s greatest masterpieces. Most of the artist’s oil paintings of this calibre are in major museums aroundtheworldwithonlya handful works of this importance having appeared at auction in the last decade.”
The work was accompanied in the bidding by Pablo Picasso’s Plant de tomates, which soared above the expected sale price of £10m and became the Spanish artist’s record still-life sale after breaking the £17m mark.