Gustav Klimt Most Expensive Painting

He was big in the ’60s, when his erotic imagery and eye-bedazzling surfaces struck a chord with the free-love and psychedelic-inspired counterculture. Then, the picture on the dormitory wall would have been Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss.”

As the ’60s waned, Klimt did too. His art rejoined the side galleries of modernism, eclipsed by the stars of the French and New York schools. The Viennese modernists — Klimt, Egon Schiele, Oscar Kokoschka and others — were too exotic for popular consumption, like hothouse orchids bred for connoisseurs.

That is about to change. With the exchange of an extraordinary sum, Klimt has been catapulted to the top of the heap, a sudden must-see on the New York art circuit. His “Adele Bloch-Bauer I,” a shimmering, gold-flecked portrait of a Viennese aristocrat (and Klimt’s reputed lover), went on view at the few galleries.

Cosmetics magnate Ronald Lauder, founder of the five-year-old museum, paid $135 million, making it the most expensive oil painting ever purchased. No other artist — not Van Gogh, nor Picasso, nor Rubens — can match that. The prior top money-getter was Picasso’s “Boy With a Pipe,” which sold for $104.1 million in 2004.

While the market is far from a perfect measure of artistic quality (inflation drives up prices, and most of the world’s museum-owned masterpieces never come up for sale), huge crowds are expected at the usually quiet Neue Galerie this weekend. And most will not be disappointed. This really is a masterpiece.

In 1903 the artist visited Ravenna, in Italy, where he was struck by the sixth-century Byzantine mosaic interior of the basilica of San Vitale. The glinting gold glass tiles embedded with precious and semi-precious gems must have seemed like a preview of heaven’s glory to the parishioners. The Klimt portraits influenced by San Vitale look more like previews of the glories of sex. Among these, the most famous, since her restitution, is “Adele Bloch-Bauer I”. The sitter’s face emerges from a gorgeous, swirling, gold-painted mosaic. She is both a beauty and a seductress. But in a photograph of her taken three years later, Mrs Bloch-Bauer seems neither beautiful nor sexy. Maybe the affair, if there was one, was over by then; it certainly must have been by 1912 when Klimt painted “Adele Bloch-Bauer II” which packs none of the first portrait’s wallop.