Christie's NY To Offer 4 Bloch-Bauer Klimt Masterpieces

Written by Amie Santillo Monday, 07 March 2011 00:21

New York City – Christie’s President Marc Porter announced that Christie’s has been selected to advise the heirs of Ferdinand and Adele Bloch-Bauer on the sale of four of the five legendary Klimts recently restituted to the family.  The fifth painting, Klimt’s golden masterwork Portrait of Adele Bloch - Bauer I, was recently purchased by The Neue Galerie New York through the efforts of its cofounder, philanthropist Ronald Lauder, in a transaction in which Christie’s assisted Mr. Lauder and the Neue Galerie.  All five works were exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in January this year before moving to the Neue Galerie in July, where they will remain exhibited together until September 18.

Praise in the media for these paintings has included “All That Glitters: Five Klimt Dazzlers” (Wall Street Journal), “They are just the rarest of the rare” (Washington Post) and the observation by The New York Times that while, “Five paintings do not normally make for a blockbuster… [the] group of five early 20th century masterpieces by Gustav Klimt has been causing a sensation.” 

“Since recovering the paintings,” says Maria Altmann, niece of the Bloch-Bauers, “my family and I have focused our efforts on arranging exhibitions in Los Angeles and New York in order to share these beautiful works and their powerful story.  Our family has now made the decision to part with them and has entrusted them to Christie’s, whose chairman, Stephen Lash, has long been our friend and supporter in our recovery efforts.”

The Family and Restitution

As noted by William Booth of The Washington Post, the restitution effort of the Bloch-Bauer heirs, “reads like a sweeping, romantic epic of loss and redemption, a tale that spans the hothouse salons of fin de siècle Vienna, the darkness of the Holocaust and the U.S. Supreme Court.”  As a wealthy Austrian industrialist who had made his fortune in the sugar industry, Ferdinand Bloch- Bauer sponsored the arts in turn-of-the-century Vienna.  Among the artists he supported was Gustav Klimt, a founding member of the Vienna Secession, a group of artists that broke away from more traditional styles of 19th century painting.  Bloch-Bauer’s wife, Adele, modeled for Klimt and became the only model who was painted twice by the artist.  His second picture of her, Adele Bloch - Bauer II, was completed in 1912 and is now being offered for sale by Christie’s.  Adele Bloch-Bauer had indicated in her will that Klimt’s paintings should be donated to the Austrian State Gallery.  After she died in 1925, her widowed and childless husband was forced to flee Austria when the Nazis took over.  His property, including the Klimt paintings, was confiscated in 1938.  The five paintings were eventually placed in Vienna’s Austrian Gallery Belvedere.  In 2000, the Bloch-Bauer heirs began a protracted court battle in the United States, following efforts originally initiated in 1998 in Austria.  The family ultimately brought its case before the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in 2004 that United States courts had jurisdiction to decide their case and therefore the heirs could sue Austria in the United States.  The parties ultimately submitted the case to binding arbitration in Austria, and in January 2006, an Austrian arbitration panel unanimously determined that the paintings should be returned to the heirs under Austria’s 1998 art restitution law.

The Four Works

Ranging in time from 1903 to 1916, the four paintings represent an exquisite overview of the different phases of Klimt’s career and the diverse subject matters he chose to explore.  Since most of Klimt’s greatest works are in museums throughout the world, these four coming to market make for a rare acquisition opportunity.  Adele Bloch-Bauer II was painted in 1912, five years after Klimt executed the fabulous, golden portrait of the same sitter.  After his golden period during which the artist also produced The Kiss , Klimt consciously turned away from the use of gold and opened his work to a wave of colors.

Houses in Unterach on Lake Atter (Häuser in Unterach am Attersee), 1916, was painted when Klimt spent the summer months with the Flöge family in Weissenbach, at Lake Atter but the first seeds for these views might have been planted when the artist sketched two villages at the Garda Lake in 1913.  The fabulous view of the village Unterach on the water shows Klimt’s fascination with colors, using them as building stones for his composition and creating at the same time a more liberated, more fluent image.  In an inimitable way, Klimt masterfully ignores all rules of perspective: the smooth facades of the houses simultaneously seem to merge with and burst from the surrounding trees.  It is a beautiful landscape that, according to Francine Prose of The Wall Street Journal, “. . . is a view of a terraced hillside rising above the water that evokes Cezanne.”  Throughout his career, Klimt visited and revisited trees as a subject matter, often even devoting his full attention to the texture and lushness of one single specimen.

Apple Tree I (Apfelbaum I), one of the “richly textured landscapes” described in The New York Times, was painted in 1911 or 1912 and is one of the illuminating examples of Klimt’s unique method to render the tree through gradations and shades of colors rather than to structure it formally.  The result is a tree that is alive and breathing, its foliage touched by a floating breeze while rays of light play games with the leaves.

Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) was an Austrian symbolist painter and one of the founding members and the first President of the Vienna Secession movement.  He began his career as a painter of interior murals in large public buildings and later moved on to portraits and landscapes which he executed in his very distinct, elegant style.  Influences on his work come from different sources including Egyptian and Byzantine inspirations as well as medieval European paintings, Henri Matisse and Japanese Ukiyo-e.

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