Europe 1 with AFP // Photo credits: Mathilde BELLENGER / AFP 09:39, June 28, 2023
A painting by Austrian painter Gustav Klimt, "The Lady with the Fan", broke Tuesday in London the record of an auction in Europe, sold under the hammer at 74 million pounds sterling (more than 86 million euros). Once the costs of the sale are added, the buyer, whose identity has not been disclosed, will have to pay more than 85 million pounds.The painting of the most famous Austrian painter Gustav Klimt "The Lady with the Fan" broke Tuesday in London the record of an auction in Europe, sold under the hammer at 74 million pounds sterling (more than 86 million euros). Sotheby's, which organized the sale, had presented this work, one of the last paintings made by Klimt (1862-1918), as "not only the star of the summer auction season in London, but also one of the most beautiful and precious ever offered in Europe".
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85 million
Once the costs of the sale are added, the buyer, whose identity has not been disclosed, will have to pay more than 85 million pounds. The "Lady with a Fan" thus dethrones the previous European record held since February 2010 by a sculpture by Alberto Giacometti, "Walking Man I", which had sold at the time for 65 million pounds, already at Sotheby's. Gustav Klimt had painted this canvas in 1917, a year before his death in 1918 at the age of 55.
Last year, at an auction at Christie's in New York of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's art collection, a Klimt painting, "The Birch Forest," sold for $104.5 million at Christie's in New York.