Estimated read time: Less than a minute
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
Makeup magnate and fine art enthusiast Ronald Lauder has paid 135 million dollars, the most ever paid for a painting, for a 1907 Gustav Klimt portrait, The New York Times reported Monday.
The portait, "Adele Bloch-Bauer 1", a gold-encrusted image of the wife of a Jewish sugar industrialist, is considered a Klimt masterpiece.
The painting long was the subject of a restitution battle between the Austrian government and a niece of Mrs. Bloch-Bauer who argued that it was seized along with four other Klimt paintings by the Nazis in World War II. In January the five paintings were awarded to the niece, Maria Altmann, 90, of Los Angeles, and other relatives, the daily reported.
Lauder purchased the work for a New York gallery he founded five years ago, Neue Galerie, focused on German and Austrian art.
"This is our Mona Lisa," the Times quoted Lauder as saying. "It is a once-in-a-lifetime acquisition."
The previous record price for a painting was 104.1 million dollars for Picasso's 1905 "Boy with a pipe" at a Sotheby's auction in 2004.
mdl/mkh
AFPLifestyle-US-art-auction-Klimt-Austria-Nazis
AFP 190947 GMT 06 06
COPYRIGHT 2004 Agence France-Presse. All rights reserved.
