Gustav Klimt: artist of the most expensive painting ever sold. Adele Block-Bauer I (1907) in June sold for a record price for a work of art - $135 million.
Ronald S. Lauder, of cosmetic fame, bought it for the Neu Galerie, a small museum of German and Austrian art at Fifty Avenue and 86th. The painting, along with four other Klimits, is on display there.
The work is reviewed in the 7/24 New Yorker in an article, Golden Girl, by Peter Schjeldahl. "Is it worth the money? Not yet," he writes, saying that the booming art market's new motto might be irrational exhuberance (Picasso's Boy With a Pipe sold two years ago for $104 million). The new Klimt record is four and a half times the previous high for Klimt, Schjeldahl notes.
Is this new relevance for an artist previously considered second-tier? Perhaps. Klimt's work seems to pre-date/anticipate the current art manipulations of the digital environment. His works almost seem to have a photo-shopped quality, a tromp d'oeil effect of symbolism and styles. Known as a rebel and the founder of the Vienna Secession, he synthesized a diverse range of sources in an individualistic way. Classic art and photography as well as sensual subjects (Adele was thought to be his mistress) became reframed, referenced and subjects were deconstructed and restructured in his own style. His painting, Birch Forest, seems to be a digitally-manipulated work. Real with a touch of surreal.
Just as the Dadaist movement can be reframed now to be understood afresh in terms of the seismic cultural shift of tech/internet we are experiencing today, Klimt and his style might be more relevant now than they were at the turn of the 20th century.