US: A 1907 Gustav Klimt portrait of Vienna aristocrat Adele Bloch-Bauer, which was looted by the Nazis and recently returned to a Los Angeles woman and her relatives, has been sold privately to a small New York museum for the highest known price ever paid for a painting.
Cosmetics magnate Ronald S Lauder bought Adele Bloch-Bauer I on behalf of the museum he founded, the Neue Galerie.
Although the exact price is not known, the Los Angeles lawyer representing Maria Altmann and four other heirs said on Sunday that Lauder paid the highest known price for a painting. Until now, the high-water mark was $104.1 million (€82.3 million), paid in 2004 by an unnamed auction bidder at Sotheby's for Picasso's Boy With a Pipe.
The New York Times, which first reported the sale of the Klimt, said the work sold for $135 million (€106.8 million).
It was only in January, after the five Klimt paintings had spent decades on display at Austria's national museum, that an Austrian court decision returned them to five heirs of Adele Bloch-Bauer, who include 90-year-old Maria Altmann of Los Angeles.
"It was important to the heirs and to my Aunt Adele that her painting be displayed in a museum," said Altmann. "We chose a museum that is a bridge between Europe and the United States."
The five paintings' collective worth had been estimated at as much as $300 million (€237 million). The four other works are a second portrait of Bloch-Bauer and three landscapes.
The heirs' representative, Los Angeles lawyer Steve Thomas, said that the family does plan to sell their four other Klimt canvases but hasn't finalised any deals. He declined to confirm or deny the $135 million sale figure, but did confirm that the figure is the highest known price for a painting.
Lauder, whose wealth was estimated at $2.7 billion by Forbes magazine in March, served as US ambassador to Austria in 1986-1987. The Neue Galerie, which Lauder opened in 2001 to focus on German and Austrian art of the turn of the century, sits in a six-storey former private residence on Manhattan's Upper Eastside. Though the young museum has thousands of items on long-term loan, including several Klimts, the Bloch-Bauer portrait joins just 166 works owned outright by the museum.
"I'm sad it's not going to Los Angeles," said Michael Govan, director of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which had hoped to secure the picture and had been displaying the five pictures since April.
"But the fact that it's going to a museum in America is great. Ronald Lauder is to be congratulated . . . The art has been a passion of his since he was a teenager. He's spent huge amounts of his life and his resources celebrating this art."
The painting's history resonates especially deeply in Los Angeles, which from the 1920s to the 1950s became a haven for Jewish Austrian intellectuals including architects Rudolf Schindler and Richard Neutra and composer Arnold Schoenberg.
Klimt, who lived from 1862 to 1918, was a key figure in European painting because his works were among the first heralds of modernism in art. His subject in the portraits, Bloch-Bauer, was married to sugar baron Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer.
Adele, a rumoured lover of the artist, owned the works until her death in 1925. She had asked her husband to donate the works to Austria's national museum, but in their successful campaign to win the canvases back, the heirs argued that he was never bound to do so. The childless Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer died in Switzerland in 1945, with niece Maria Altmann among his heirs.