Klimt - A Bid Too Far?

“Adele Bloch-Bauer I” (1907), by Gustav Klimt, is showboat art that, last month, fetched a showboat price: 135 million dollars, the most on record for a work of art. The cosmetics magnate Ronald S. Lauder bought it for the Neue Galerie, the spruce little museum of Austrian and German modern art at 5 Avenue and 86 Street . “Adele” is now on display there, along with four other Klimts. An Austrian Jewish sugar industrialist and Adele’s husband, he fled the country after the Anschluss, in 1938; his art was seized by the Nazis. The works hung in the Austrian Art Gallery of the Belvedere Palace, in Vienna, whilst lawyers wrangled over ambiguous wills; an Austrian arbitration panel awarded the paintings to the heirs early this year. Adele, a twenty-five-year-old socialite and patroness in 1907, was probably one of the priapic Klimt’s many lovers, though perhaps not for long: the gold-and silver-leafed hieratic portrait is piercingly erotic; its brushy, more Expressionist 1912 sequel is not. It’s all there in “Adele”: the painting is exquisite and brazen, compelling and brittle, too self-conscious to be experienced as altogether beautiful but transcendent in its cunning way. Is she worth the money? Not yet. Paintings this special may not come along for sale often, and the 104 million dollars spent for a a so-so Picasso, “Boy with a Pipe,” two years ago indicated that irrational exuberance could be the booming art market’s new motto. But Lauder’s outlay predicts a level of cost that must either soon become common or be relegated in art history as a bid too far. For the full story - click the title Irish Art