Last updated on June 24th, 2023 at 02:28 pm
On June 14, 2023, Sotheby’s revealed Gustav Klimt’s painting Dame mit Fächer (Lady with a Fan) in London this summer auction season. It is said that the painting stood on an easel in Gustav Klimt’s studio at the time of the artist’s unexpected and untimely death in February 1918.
The last portrait Klimt painted, Dame mit Fächer, is one of his best. It was created when he was still in his artistic prime, at a time when the “formality” of his earlier commissioned work gave way to a new expressivity—an ever-deeper, ever-joyful immersion in pattern, colour, and form, which, while clearly influenced by Van Gogh, Matisse, and Gauguin, became something entirely different in his hands.
While the slightly earlier works of Klimt’s famous “golden period”—led by the iconic portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I of 1907—present their sitter icon-like amid a tapestry of golden shapes, here the sitter almost dissolves into the background, the soft patterning of the woman’s skin repeated in the pale-yellow background.
By 1917, Klimt was one of Europe’s most famous portraitists, receiving commissions at fees significantly higher than his peers. He began work on Lady with a Fan. This was a rare painting he painted for himself. Klimt enjoyed painting it and appreciating beauty in its simplest form. It also shows his creativity. Portraits are traditionally painted vertically. Klimt’s square format gives this picture a “modern” feel.
Klimt expresses his absolute passion for Chinese and Japanese art and culture here. He wore silken kimonos and Chinese robes, and his home was filled with Eastern artefacts. According to frequent visitor Egon Schiele, “the sitting room [was] furnished with a square table in the middle and a large number of Japanese prints covering the walls.” he went into another room whose wall was covered by a gigantic closet that kept his magnificent collection of Chinese and Japanese robes.
“The beauty and sensuality of the portrait lies in the detail: the flecks of blue and pink which enliven the sitter’s skin, the feathery lines of her eyelashes and the pursed lips that give her face character. Klimt here gave himself full freedom to capture on canvas a devastatingly beautiful woman. Her provocatively bared shoulder, poise and quiet self-assurance combine to stunning effect.”
THOMAS BOYD BOWMAN, HEAD OF IMPRESSIONIST AND MODERN ART EVENING SALES, SOTHEBY’S LONDON
Klimt uses Chinese phoenixes (symbols of immortality and rebirth, good fortune, and loyalty) and lotus blossoms (symbols of love, happy marriage, and purity) in Dame mit Fächer. His background flatness and pattern juxtaposition show his love of Japanese woodblock prints.
Viennese industrialist Erwin Böhler bought the picture after Klimt’s death. Klimt and Schiele were friends and patrons of Erwin’s brother Heinrich and cousin Hans Böhler. They vacationed with Gustav Klimt on the Attersee, a lake near Salzburg that inspired many of his landscapes. Erwin bought Klimt’s Litzelberg island in 1916. The painting hung in the Music Room of Erwin Böhler’s apartment in Vienna’s Palais Dumba alongside Klimt’s Waldabhang in Unterach am Attersee and Presshaus am Attersee, which he collected. After Heinrich died in 1940, Mabel inherited the work.
Rudolf Leopold bought an extensive series of Schiele drawings from Mabel Böhler in 1952 and may have purchased this work from her by 1967. In 1994, the current owner’s family bought Dame mit Fächer. It was recently reunited with Klimt’s other late masterpieces in the Vienna Belvedere.
Later this month, the painting’s exhibition in Sotheby’s New Bond Street galleries will be a landmark for Klimt fans in London, with three of the artist’s significant portraits on display for the first time. (The other portraits, Hermine Gallia of 1904 and Adele Bloch Bauer II of 1912 are in the National Gallery’s famed “After Impressionism” show.)
Lady with a Fan, one of Klimt’s few private paintings, will be sold at Sotheby’s London Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction on June 27 for £65 million ($80 million).
The picture is the most valuable ever offered at auction in Europe, and it joins the ranks of the most valuable portraits of any age.
Klimt’s Birch Forest sold last year as part of the Paul G. Allen Collection for $104.6m, making him one of the few artists to sell for over $100m. In 2006, Klimt’s 1912 Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II sold for $87.9m.
Dame mit Fächer follows a strong succession of stunning works that have starred in Sotheby’s Marquee Seasons in London, most notably René Magritte’s L’empire des lumières (sold for £59.4m / $79.8m, March 2022) and Wassily Kandinsky’s Murnau mit Kirche II (sold for £37.2m / $44.9m, March 2023).
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