The painting Woman with a Fan, by Gustav Klimt, has broken a record by auctioning this Tuesday for 74 million pounds sterling (more than 86 million euros) and becoming "the most valuable work auctioned so far in Europe," according to a note from Sotheby's house London.
The work shows Klimt at the peak of his creative capacity. The fabric features representations of a lotus flower, a phoenix, and other elements. It is one of the few portraits of Klimt that is in a private collection, where it arrived in 1994 after the purchase from its current owner for 9.3 million euros at the time of exchange.
Woman with a Fan is one of the last works that the artist painted before he died in February 1918, barely four weeks after putting the last brushstrokes on it. In fact, it is considered that the author would not have considered it finished.
The painting was exhibited last year in Vienna along with another of Klimt's latest works, The Bride, after more than a century of not being exhibited in the Austrian capital.
Rudolf Leopold, owner of the painting since the 1960s, took it out of the country in 1981 and asked to exhibit it in Tokyo. Apparently it did not return to the country or it left again irregularly, since it was auctioned in New York in 1994 in an operation that the Austrian authorities investigated without being able to clarify.
