Klimt’s Final Masterpiece Sells for $108 M., Achieving European Auction Record

Gustav Klimt’s Dame mit Fächer (Lady with a Fan), 1917–18, became the most expensive painting ever to sell at auction in Europe during the Sotheby’s London Modern and Contemporary Evening Auction, after it hammered at an astounding £74 million ($94.3 million).

With fees, the total price achieved exceeded £85.3 million ($108 million). Alberto Giacometti’s Walking Man I held the previous record for a European auction, selling for $104.3 million at Sotheby’s London in 2010.

Lady with a Fan was expected to reach around $80 million. The masterpiece was last on the auction block at Sotheby’s New York in 1994, when it sold for $11.6 million, a fraction of its current record-smashing price. 

According to the auction house, Lady with a Fan was still on an easel in Klimt’s studio when the artist died from a stroke in early 1918. Despite being less famous than The Kiss (1907–08) or Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907), Lady with a Fan displays all the spontaneity and formal prowess of the artist’s most cherished works.