Late last month, Gustav Klimt’s Dame mit Fächer (Lady with a Fan) (1917-1918) sold for $108.4 million at Sotheby’s London Modern and Contemporary Evening Auction. The price set a new record for the artist—surpassing the $104.5 million paid for Birch Forest (1903) at the Paul Allen sale at Christie’s in New York this past fall—and a new record for any work sold in Europe, beating a sculpture by Alberto Giacometti that sold for $104.3 million in 2010.
The world economy remains uncertain, with the Wall Street Journal this week calling it a “richcession,” a sorta-recession that really only affects wealthier segments of the population, who are probably not going to have their homes repossessed when they get fired from their high-income jobs. Following an Art Basel that was solid but varied, many looked to London for signs that the art market was roaring back. Was the Klimt sale such a signal? Or an indication that post-Brexit London had, as Scott Reyburn put it in his New York Times piece on the sale, “regained some credibility as the capital of Europe’s high-value art market?”
“I think that bidders go where the pictures are,” dealer Richard Nagy said in an interview with Observer from London when asked about the Reyburn quote. “I think you could also say one swallow doesn’t make a summer.”
Nagy deals in Klimt and said Lady with a Fan was “a very pretty, very decorative painting. Prettier than most in terms of the subject and that goes a long way in this market.” The price was also not so remarkable, he said. Klimt’s most famous works are his portraits rather than his landscapes, and the price was not so far from the price paid for Birch Forest, a less-famous piece but one that was, in Nagy’s opinion, “superlative.”
“I think the Allen Birch trees was one of the most fabulous of his landscapes and so a portrait of similar quality was always going to make that money,” Nagy said. “You could argue that if the market was much more bubbly it might have done better.”
Little was known about the sitter, beyond that she was “beautiful in a modern way,” and the fact that it was left on Klimt’s easel may have meant we can’t be sure “he didn’t have further ideas” for it.
Having said that, Nagy hastened to add, “It’s just an excellent example of what Klimt was about. An enormous amount of surface decoration around an idealized sitter.”
News reports said much of the bidding seemed to originate in Asia, and Nagy said this was unsurprising, as exhibitions of Vienna Secession work have been popular there for at least 30 years, owing to the group’s awareness of Japanese prints and other artworks from the region.
“I did an Egon Schiele exhibition in Hong Kong and Seoul, and on both occasions, I was absolutely mobbed with people,” Nagy said. “When I said I was somewhat surprised at how well-known Schiele was over there, I remember a Chinese student told me, ‘But of course, we all study it.’”
So in many ways, this headline sale was, in fact, par for the course. But in the current economy, that probably suits many people.
