Gustav Klimt – Blumenwiese (Blooming Meadow) sold for $86.9 million in November
Sotheby’s announced projected consolidated sales of $7.0 billion for 2025, a 17% increase on 2024. Auction sales rose 26% year-over-year to $5.7 billion, with sales accelerating significantly in the second half of the year, up 59% versus the second half of 2024. Private sales reached $1.2 billion, down slightly from the prior year. Both the Global Fine Art and Luxury categories posted strong gains, with Global Fine Art sales increasing 15% to $4.3 billion and Luxury sales up 22% to $2.7 billion.
The company sold the most valuable collection of the year for the sixth time in the last seven years – the Leonard A. Lauder Collection – and sold seven of the year’s top ten auction works globally. The company inaugurated its new global headquarters at the Breuer with six white-glove (100% sold) sales totaling $1.17 billion, including the highest total for Modern art sold in one week at Sotheby’s ($843 million), the highest value work of art ever sold at Sotheby’s (Gustav Klimt’s Bildnis Elisabeth Lederer (Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer) for $236.4 million) and the largest Contemporary Day sale ever.
Sotheby’s executed its most valuable single-owner sale ever staged by Sotheby’s in London and in Europe with Pauline Karpidas: The London Collection realising a combined total of $137 million.
Gustav Klimt – Portrait of Elizabeth Lederer at Sotheby’s. UPDATE: THIS SOLD FOR $236.4 MILLION
With Klimt, Calder, Kahlo, Magritte, Rothko and Van Gogh among headliners at sales by Christie’s and Sotheby’s in New York this month the global art market is not short of exciting promise. Leading lights like this ensure that the market for art will never be dull even when it is in a state of flux.
There is resilience in the face of global uncertainty and looming threats like war, inflation and market collapse. The November sales have been carefully assembled. Many of the major works on offer have been exhibited at leading museums or come from major collections like that of Leonard Lauder at Sotheby’s. This reflects the fact that the focus of the market is less speculative than in headier times.
A masterpiece by Klimt – the striking full length ‘Portrait of Elizabeth Lederer’ – leads the auction series and could bring in as much as $150 million. The sale of the Lauder collection on November 18, described by the auctioneers as a once in a generation collection of 20th century masterpieces, will inaugurate Sotheby’s new global headquarters at the Breuer Building, formerly the Whitney Museum. The cosmetics magnate, who died aged 92 last June, donated around $1 billion worth of Cubist art to the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
Painted Wood by Alexander Calder at Christie’s. UPDATE: THIS MADE $20,415,000
Painted Wood, the most significant constellation work by Alexander Calder, is a leading highlight at Christie’s 20th Century evening sale on November 17. Measuring nearly seven feet in height and width it is the largest of his early painted wood mobiles to come to auction. The wood, string, wire and paint construction made in 1943 is guiding at $15 million – $20 million (€17.25 million – €25.87 million) the highest ever auction estimate for a Calder.
Sotheby’s will offer the Cindy and Jay Pritzker collection of Modern and Impressionist art with Van Gogh’s Romans parisiennes (Les Livres jaunes) – Parisian novels (the yellow books) – from 1887 at its heart. The collection features a monumental triptych by Matisse of Leda and the Swan and a Pont-Aven canvas by Gauguin. Frieda Kahlo’s psychologically charged El sueno (La cama) – The Dream (the bed) – is an intimate meditation on identity and mortality from an important private collection of Surrealist art. There are pioneering visions by Dorothea Tanning, Kay Sage, Remedios Varo and Valentine Hugo and other artists whose work expanded the range of Surrealism.
Frieda Kahlo El Sueno (La Cama) – The Dream (the bed) at Sotheby’s. UPDATE: THIS SOLD FOR $54.7 MILLION
Picasso, Mondrian, Rothko, Matisse, Franz Kline, Miro, Max Ernst and Braque feature in the Weis collection in a dedicated sale at Christie’s on November 17. This will precede the 20th century evening auction celebrating vangard artists from the Parisian studios of the Impressionists to the downtown lofts of post war New York. The sale offers masterpieces by Monet, Renoir, Chagall, Picasso, Leger, Calder, Richard Diebenkorn and David Hockney with monumental sculptures by Henry Moore, Isamu Noguchi and David Smith.
The 21st century evening sale at Christie’s on November 19 offers masterworks from the past 60 years including standout works by Richard Prince, Ed Ruscha, Jeff Koons and Andy Warhol.
Piet Mondrian – Composition with red and blue 1939-1941 from the Weis collection at Christie’s. UPDATE: THIS MADE $23,060,000
Lady with a fan by Gustav Klimt at Sotheby’s. UPDATE: THIS SOLD FOR £85.3 MILLION TO BECOME THE MOST VALUABLE PAINTING EVER SOLD IN EUROPE.
A late painting by Klimt set to become the most valuable artwork ever sold in Europe, wonderful antique furniture, portraits and exceptional collectibles will make rich pickings for the rich and plenty of eye candy for the rest of us in London in the coming weeks. This is the time of year when the art world descends on the British capital for a variety of major sales, fairs and significant one off events like the re-opening after five years of the world renowned National Portrait Gallery. Despite some indications that the global art market might be in slightly hesitant mode right now the London summer season of 2023 is unlikely to disappoint. Lady with a Fan by Klimt at Sotheby’s Modern and Contemporary evening sale on June 27 has an estimate of around €80 million. The last portrait he painted was still on an easel in the studio at the time of his untimely death in the flu pandemic of 1918. Featuring an unnamed woman it is described by Sotheby’s as an ever deeper, ever more joyful immersion in pattern, colour and form, filled with the creative exuberance. The auction will offer a strong grouping of portraits with work by artists like Alberto Giacomett and Edvard Munch.
These c1765 carved mirrors in the Chippendale style are being shown by Ronald Phillips at the Treasure House Fair
In celebration of the re-opening of London’s National Portrait Gallery last Thursday the dynamism of portraiture across the centuries, redefined by each generation, will again be highlighted at Christie’s sale on June 28. One of the more contemporary offerings here is Diplomacy I by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Part of the Tate Retrospective which closed last February it depicts a group of suited delegates recalling Marion Kaplan’s photographs of African heads of state at a summit in Uganda in 1967. The artist has created bold new characters for black representation in art. In this imagined portrait Yiadom-Boakye has inserted a single woman, clad in pink. The sale offers portraits by Frank Auerbach, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Edgar Degas, Lucian Freud and Howard Hodgkin.
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Diplomacy I (2009) at Christie’s. UPDATE: THIS MADE £1,371,000
The Treasure House Fair, in full swing until next Monday at the Royal Hospital in Chelsea, was generated by leading UK dealers after the cancellation of Masterpiece, which cited a lack of overseas exhibitor interest. Treasure House has attracted dealers from France, Switzerland and the US like Geoffrey Diner and Michele Beiny. There is fine antique furniture from leading UK dealers like Ronald Phillips at this curated global event with distinguished names across a wide range of disciplines.Meantime the city is gearing up for London Art Week which runs from June 30 to July 7 with 53 specialists and expert dealers with museum quality examples of decorative arts, paintings, sculpture and works on paper from antiquity to contemporary. Various galleries will show work by Irish artists like Sir John Lavery, Gerald Leslie Brockhurst (who lived here for a time) Augustus John and Gwen John as well showcasing artists from Giambologna to Renoir, Picasso and Dora Maar. The Fine Arts Society will exhibit an enamel by Phoebe Anna Traquair, the Irish born artist who achieved international recognition for her role in the Arts and Crafts Movement in Scotland. She produced large scale murals, embroidery, enamel jewellery and book illuminations. On show in London is The Life of the Virgin (1906), three plaques in enamel with foil on copper.
The Life of the Virgin (1906) by Dublin born Phoebe Anna Traquair is on display at the Fine Arts Society in London.
Gustav Klimt Bildnis Gertrud Loew (Gertha Felsoványi) UPDATE: THIS SOLD FOR £24.8 MILLION
Gustav Klimt’s captivating portrait Bildnis Gertrud Loew comes up at Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern evening sale in London on June 24. This follows a settlement between the Felsöványi family and The Klimt Foundation. Dating from 1902 it is estimated at £12-18 million. It depicts Gertrud Loew, later known by her married name Gertha Felsöványi,a member of fin-de-siècle Viennese society, wreathed in diaphanous folds of gossamer fabric.
Helena Newman, Sotheby’s Co-Head of Impressionist & Modern Art Worldwide said: “Bildnis Gertrud Loew, from a crucial period in the artist’s career, is one his finest portraits to appear at auction in over twenty years.”
Gertrud Felsöványi’s granddaughter on behalf of family heirs, said: “This portrait portrays the brave and determined nature of my grandmother. Her strength of character and beauty lives on in this visual embodiment. My father, Anthony Felsöványi, last saw this painting in June 1938 when he left the family home for the last time to depart for America. At that time my grandmother had been advised to leave her family home to live in a less grand home to try to avoid the attention of the Nazis, given her Jewish ancestry. Eventually, under duress, in 1939 she left Vienna altogether to join my father in America, having left all of her belongings behind – including this painting. Her home had been taken over as a Nazi headquarters and she had left her valuable belongings with friends and acquaintances. After the war, she never returned to Vienna. Only my father’s sister did, with the hope of retrieving some of their belongings, but to no avail. My father said that my grandmother never again mentioned the painting or the valuable belongings she had left behind”.
UPDATE: THIS SOLD FOR £24.8 MILLION. The sale followed a ten minute bidding battle. It was the second highest price paid for a Klimt portrait at auction.
Tags: Klimt, sotheby's Posted in ART, AUCTIONS | Comments Off on CAPTIVATING KLIMT PORTRAIT AT SOTHEBY’S
Klimt masterpiece Litzlberg am Attersee (Litzlberg on the Attersee) at Sotheby's in New York. (Click on image to enlarge) UPDATE: IT MADE $40.4 MILLION.
Gustav Klimt’s masterpiece Litzlberg am Attersee (Litzlberg on the Attersee) promises to be an important highlight of Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern evening sale in New York next November 2. It is a dramatic view of the lush environs of Lake Attersee in western Austria. Painted with Klimt’s sumptuous palette and jewel-like surface it is estimated to make more than $25 million.
Klimt’s Kirche in Cassone (Landschaft mit Zypressen) (Church in Cassone – Landscape with Cypresses) made an auction record for a landscape by the artist when it sold for £26.9 million ($43.2 million) at Sotheby’s London in February 2010.
Both paintings were originally in the collection of Austrian iron magnate Viktor Zuckerkandl and his wife Paula. They were stolen after the annexation of Austria in 1938. Each has been restituted to Georges Jorisch, great-nephew of Viktor, after intensive research revealed that his memory of the works hanging in the family’s home in Purkersdorf was correct. Litzlberg am Attersee was returned to Mr. Jorisch late last week from the Museum der Moderne Salzburg. A portion of the proceeds from its sale will be donated to that museum for the building of a new extension.
