June 20, 2006

Neue Galerie to get $135 million Klimt painting

Gustav Klimt's portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer has been purchased for Manhattan's Neue Galerie for a reported $135 million, making it the most expensive payment ever for a painting, according to the New York Times.

Bloch-Bauer was married to a Jewish sugar industrialist and was known for hosting a Vienna salon of artists. Looted by the Nazis, the 1907 gold-flecked portrait spent decades in the Belvedere Palace in Vienna before a court ordered it returned one of Bloch-Bauer's nieces. The portrait is on loan to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art through June 30 but will come to the Neue Galerie July 13 for the opening of the pre-scheduled show "Gustav Klimt: Five Paintings From the Collection of Ferdinand and Adele Bloch-Bauer."

The painting was purchased by Ronald S. Lauder, chairman of cosmetics company Estée Lauder and a past ambassador to Austria. In 2001, he started the Neue Galerie, a small museum focusing on German and Austrian fine and decorative arts.

The second-most expensive painting ever sold was Picasso's "Boy With a Pipe (The Young Apprentice,)" which sold for $104.1 million in 2004.

The Neue Galerie is located at 1048 Fifth Ave., at 86th Street, map.

June 20, 2006 07:45 AM in Museums, Sightsology, Upper East Side

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