Lauder heir pays record $219m for Klimt portrait

NEW YORK - A private art museum in New York founded by Ronald Lauder, the cosmetics heir and billionaire tycoon, has reportedly paid a record US$135 million (NZ$219m) for a Gustav Klimt portrait, until recently the subject of a notorious Nazi restitution battle.

Generally considered one of Klimt's most important works, the 1907 portrait is an exuberant homage in oil and gold to Adele Bloch-Bauer, a Viennese socialite and - according to some historians - a mistress of the artist.

Its beauty and visual accessibility has made it one of the most widely recognised works of any major 20th Century artist.

"This is our Mona Lisa," Mr Lauder told the New York Times yesterday, confirming that the painting will shortly be hanging in the Neue Galerie, a small but excruciatingly elegant museum he helped open in 2001 just across Fifth Avenue from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The purchase price cited by the Times - Mr Lauder is forbidden from confirming the actual number by confidentiality agreements - is easily enough to put the painting in the record books.

Until now, the highest known price ever paid was US$104.1 million (NZ$168.8m) at a Sotheby's auction two years ago for Picasso's 1905 'Boy with Pipe'.

Few paintings, meanwhile, have come to the market with quite such a story of historical intrigue.

The seller is Maria Altmann, a niece of Ms Bloch-Bauer living in Los Angeles, who only this January won a protracted legal battle to reclaim ownership of this and four other Klimt paintings.

Ms Bloch-Bauer herself died in 1925 and the painting passed to her widower, Ferdinand, a wealthy industrialist and sugar refinery owner in Austria.

In 1938, the whole family - including Ms Altmann, who is now 90 years old - fled the country and its new Nazi rulers.

Left behind was a huge catalogue of family treasures, ranging from palaces to priceless porcelain, jewelry and the Klimt oils - all subsequently confiscated by the Nazis.

For the next six decades, the painting - 'Adele Bloch-Bauer I' - hung in the Austrian Gallery in the Belvedere Palace in Vienna and remained one of Austria's most beloved national treasures.

A will written by Ferdinand before his death in 1945 indicated that the Austrian Gallery was where he wanted the work to remain.

But Ms Altmann maintained indefatigably that the painting rightfully belonged to her and her heirs.

When the Austrian government passed legislation in 1998 approving the return of all artworks plundered by the Nazi to the heirs of the original families, she began legal action to reclaim all five of the Klimt paintings.

In 2004, the US Supreme Court affirmed her right to sue the Austrian government, which finally surrendered the works this January.

It seemed that Ms Altmann never intended hanging the picture of her aunt in her own front room, however.

Instead, she loaned the work in April to the Los Angeles County Museum where it has drawn huge numbers of visitors.

Her decision to sell it meanwhile to Mr Lauder is a bitter disappointment to that museum.

In a statement Ms Altmann said only that it was "important to the heirs and to my Aunt Adele that her painting be displayed in a museum".

She added: "We chose a museum that is a bridge between Europe and the United States."

With a private fortune estimated at US$2.7 billion, Mr Lauder opened the Neue Galerie in New York in 2001 shortly after the 9/11 terror attacks.

It is dedicated to displaying both Austrian and German art and the Klimt is clearly destined to be its most important exhibit.

Nor is Mr Lauder unfamiliar with Austria's tangled past.

He served under President Ronald Reagan as the US Ambassador to Austria, a tenure that is remember above all because of his refusal to attend the inauguration of Austrian President Kurt Waldheim at a time when his own history of Nazi collaboration was just coming to light.

- INDEPENDENT