Art & Fashion

Klimt's Lady with a Fan: The painting that's valued at £65m

Austrian painter Gustav Klimt is best known for the immortal grandeur of modern art landmarks such as his yellow-leafed canvas The Kiss, 1907- 8, and Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, 1907. It is a lesser-known work. - which still sat with the artist when Klimt died of a cold followed by the flu in February 1918, a month after a stroke. for painting in Europe when it comes to the market next week. Different in texture and tone from his best-known paintings of the previous decade, Dame mit Fächer (Lady with a Fan), 1917-18, is very pleasant, planned, and more than £65 million sterling ($83 million), which seems to be another world. and shows where Klimt's ideas would have gone if he had not been swept away by the pandemic flu. In a strange way of combining technique and music together, a woman with a fan holding a girl lost in thought as she stands in front of us, looking into the distance to our left. It is not known who he is. That she had not seen our entry into the space so close to where she lived, bedroom or boudoir, seemed so beautiful from the timeless detachment of her beautiful dress and her arms and the clasp of her fingers. and is protected by a spinner. crazy - a dangerous tool that feels too small to fail. 

Influenced by the Art Nouveau style and painted with added gold leaf, The Kiss (1907-8) is one of Klimt's most popular works (Credit: Alamy)

What makes us admire the woman's happiness is the conflict of patterns, pigments, and textures that have been carefully made, which are balanced and attractive elsewhere. This work is a rare commodity of Klimt's traditional ideas, from the flowing Chinese clothes to the floating lyricism of the Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock, which the artist collected and inspired holy do something. Klimt's house, according to the Austrian spokesman Egon Schiele, whom Klimt advised, provided "a large number of Japanese books covering the walls" and "a large wardrobe, with a wonderful collection of 'Chinese works' in Japanese. bathrobes \". The girl's rich silk with green and gold drapes, her scarlet fur, her maroon skirts, and the fluttering of fan leaves, all flourish the tumult of the chaos behind him is growing stronger. This textured background, reminiscent of the elegance of Japanese woodblocks and Chinese-painted porcelain, can be as beautiful wallpaper as easily as the abstract fabric of a girl's dreamy imagination. We see here floating a mysterious phoenix (or Fènghuáng, a symbol of grace and virtue in Chinese mythology) with beautiful feathers and emerald fangs as if - from the mystery of his spirit. 

Next to the phoenix, standing on the right side of the canvas, sporting breast feathers of beautiful ultramarine, stands a long-legged crane, a symbol of wisdom and the sun, always around the non-existent air burst with luminous shards and pink lotus flowers tree, showing the immutability of beauty. The Lady with a Fan is one of the few paintings by Klimt, a leader in the Viennese Secession art movement, to be held in secret. It was last sold in 1994 when it fetched $11.6m (£9m). Thirty years later, it is expected to cost nearly seven times as much, and will likely be one of the most expensive paintings ever sold. market. If Sotheby's reaches the asking price of £65.5 million ($83.4 million), Klimt's new painting will top René Magritte's Empire of the Light, which sold for £59.4 million ($75.6 million). ) in the year 2022; The Walking Man by Alberto Giacometti, which set the record for all paintings sold at auction in Europe in 2010 for £65 million ($83); and Claude Monet's Water Lilies, which sold for £40.9 million ($52) in 2008. Alongside Klimt's most famous works, such as The Kiss and Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, a woman with a Fan reveals how far the artist had come in the decade before his death. The glittering fringes of gold leaf raised the things he loved into obscene images. It is stronger and more expressive in its bones, a woman who has a fan based on her strength and the richness of textures, both material and psychological, where she runs into one bright object. Adding to this sense of fluidity, there are moments in the painting where the canvas is still visible - an unpainted area that has led some to think that the work is still unfinished. But it's a portrait of his power from change and division. Its imperfection is what completes it.

site_map