Klimts Make YUGE Bucks at Sotheby’s, and Are Maine’s Aggrieved Penobscots Happy to Let a Masterpiece Rot?

Also in the news, Fabergé’s Winter Egg, with thousands of tiny diamonds, is set to sell at Christie’s.

G iven Tuesday’s $236.4 million sale of Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer at Sotheby’s, the highest price ever for a work of modern art, I’ll do my monthly news story a week early. The Klimt portrait, two Klimt landscapes, and other treasures were from the collection of Leonard Lauder, the billionaire, philanthropist, and art collector who died this past June at 92. After 20 tense minutes of bidding, the full-length portrait from between 1914 and 1916, depicting the 20-year-old daughter of Vienna’s richest industrialist, went to a phone bidder. The world auction record is $450.3 million, set in 2017 for Salvator Mundi, partly painted by Leonardo da Vinci

The tuxedoed and balletic auctioneer Oliver Barker took bids. The event, which is on YouTube, is a study in bidding psychology and in Barker’s talent as a coaxer. Bidding starts at $130 million. It’s supposed to be at $2 million intervals. One bidder tries a $1 million jump. Barker accepts but asks for a $5 million increase, trying to thin the floor and phones of bargain hunters and skinflints. The richest and most committed bidders comply. They’re using shock-and-awe tactics, hoping to persuade others to bow to an imagined reality of one obsessed billionaire bidder wanting the Klimt so badly that he’ll bust the bank to get it.

Specialists on the sidelines talk to bidders on the phone, their hands cupped over the mouths to thwart lip readers. Sometimes the bidding stalls, at $168 million, then someone goes to $175 million. Things are getting serious. We’re in a bidding war. I’d love to hear the other side of the calls — wives screaming at their husbands for spending too much money, Arab sheiks pausing so they can order a beheading, Chinese potentates calculating how much moolah their latest stolen American invention will get them and when. Barker used long pauses, smiles, quips, and coos like “wonderful painting” and “something like this will never come up again” to get to $205 million, the hammer price. The buyer’s premium pushed the cost to $236.4 million. That’s $31 million for Sotheby’s plus whatever the auction house negotiated with Lauder’s estate.

We don’t know who bought it. I’ve seen the portrait. It’s nice. Klimt (1862–1918) did one or two full-length portraits of women a year, usually rich Vienna Jews, from around 1898 until his death from the Spanish flu. The Kiss and Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I — renamed as Woman in Gold to conceal the sitter’s identity — are well known and sexy as well as exotic. Elisabeth Lederer was young, and her father commissioned the portrait. It’s a chaste picture and decorative. By the mid-Teens Klimt had lost his avant-garde oomph. Still, a prettier portrait is hard to find, and Klimts are rare.

Leonard Lauder and I, a simple country soul, intersected twice. Around 1999, when I was a curator at the Clark Art Institute, the Clark partnered with the Galerie Belvedere in Vienna to do a Klimt landscape exhibition. We had high hopes for a splendid exhibition but soon collided with issues of restitution of Nazi loot. The Galerie Belvedere and its master, the Republic of Austria, were sued in American court by Adele Bloch-Bauer’s family, based in California, contending that five Klimt paintings in the Belvedere collection had been illegally seized by Nazi Austria, among them Woman in Gold. Before long, our partner, the Belvedere, refused to lend anything to the Clark, even Klimts with squeaky-clean provenance. The Austrians feared that their pictures would be held hostage pending the return of the Bloch-Bauer art.

It became a huge headache since private collectors of Klimt landscapes living in Austria followed the Belvedere’s lead. They knew the provenance of their Klimts better than anyone and were therefore cold to the very idea of sending them outside Austria. We pieced together an exhibition, a small one of 13 landscapes, among them three lent by Lauder. I visited him in New York to negotiate the loans. When the exhibition opened in 2002, he and his wife, Evelyn, now also dead, drove to the Clark. I walked through the show with them and another Clark curator. They took their Klimts off their living room walls to support the Clark show, God bless them.

Then, my experience with New York billionaires and culture celebrities was scanty. They were fun, warm, and down-to-earth. Lauder was also a brilliant collector. A few years ago, he gave his billion-dollar collection of French Cubist art — Picasso, Braque, and then some — to the Met. He chaired the Whitney board for years. His $130 million gift to the Whitney in 2008 launched the museum to its new home in Chelsea. For years, the Whitney tried to expand its building on Madison Avenue, running each time into the killer buzzsaw of neighborhood opposition.

Two of Lauder’s Klimt landscapes were on the block at Sotheby’s, along with the Lederer picture. Blooming Meadow went for $86 million. Forest Slope in Unterach on the Attersea sold for $68.3 million. Klimt isn’t famous for his landscapes, but they’re fresh and soothing yet bracing, too, like a drink of cold water when badly parched. The total take from the Lauder sale was $527.5 million, a gusher given its low estimate of $379 million. No wonder staffers were smiling.

In a separate Sotheby’s sale this week, Maurizio Cattelan’s 18-carat gold toilet, fit to flush, sold for $12.1 million to, of all things, Ripley Entertainment, which publishes Ripley’s Believe It or Not books and also has a corporate art collection. The toilet weighs 2,240 ounces, or 1,668 ounces of pure gold. Cattelan’s infamous Comedian, a banana duct-taped to a wall, sold last year at Sotheby’s for $6.2 million. The toilet, called America, is the only one, we think, on God’s Green Earth, the second version having been stolen from Blenheim Palace in 2019 and never found, though the thieves have been convicted. It’s shlock art, but that didn’t stop 25,000 people from waiting in line to see it. What a waste of time.

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I like Christie’s as much as Sotheby’s and, over the years, had far more friends who worked there. Christie’s was, in ye olden times, for gentlemen and connoisseurs. Sotheby’s, well, specialized in “the more bucks the better,” however you got ’em. Christie’s had a good modern art sale this week, too. It sold Rothko’s No. 31 (Yellow Stripe) for $62.2 million, a late Monet water-lily pond picture for $45.5 million, and David Hockney’s nearly life-size portrait of Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy from 1968 for $44.3 million. It’s one of Hockney’s great portraits. John Singer Sargent’s Gondolier’s Siesta, from around 1902, went for $7.4 million, a record for his watercolors. Sargent loved Venice and especially its gondoliers, perfecting, word has it, shake, rattle, and roll on a canal. Christie’s 20th-century art auctions hauled $689.8 million.

Christie’s is top-notch at everything, but I always enjoy its Old Master sales, which occur in early December. Fabergé’s Winter Egg, from 1913, is up for sale at its December 2 sale in London devoted to all things Fabergé. Tsar Nicholas II commissioned it from the Russia-based jeweler as an Easter gift to his mother. Nice thing to find in your Easter basket! Mine is more likely filled with marshmallow Peeps and a new weeding hoe. The egg is a tiny thing, less than 6 inches tall, but adorned with 4,508 tiny diamonds, suggesting ice, and set in transparent quartz, some etched to look like a frosted window.

Faberge created about 50 eggs for the royal family, most expressing an art history moment — a Rococo egg, a Baroque egg, a Mannerist egg — but this one is seasonal. Each egg has a surprise inside. The Winter Egg has a basket of wood anemones, an early spring buttercup, some buds, some blooms in full flower, made of gold, platinum, garnets, rose-cut diamonds, and pale-green nephrite. Carl Fabergé is one of the great design entrepreneurs of his age. This egg is special not only for its evocative design. The year it was given to the Dowager Empress — 1913 — would be the Romanov clan’s last in peace. The Reds seized the Winter Egg, along with much else, and sold it to Wartski, the London jeweler, in the early 1930s for hard cash.

My spies tell me the undisclosed low estimate is $27 million. It last sold at auction in 2002 for $9.6 million, a record then for a Fabergé egg. Chalk up the price jump to the affordability crisis.

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Do high auction prices mean that the art-market doldrums are behind us? No. The richest among us are very, very rich, and those buying $236.4 million Klimts, multimillion-dollar Fabergé eggs, and gold toilets are only a slice of this vast, exceedingly diverse marketplace. The auction houses are keeping their heads above water, in part by embracing the luxury-goods markets — think handbags, sneakers, watches, and rare scotch — as well as oddball objects like dinosaur fossils, meteorites, and Hollywood ephemera. On October 22, for instance, Christie’s sold Vivien Leigh’s passport, which she held between 1932 and 1940. It has the photo of the beautiful Dresden shepherdess, with stamps signaling her time in America making Gone with the Wind and her earlier visit in 1938 to pitch herself as Scarlett O’Hara to David O. Selznick, the blockbuster’s producer.

In 1938, Selznick’s team was already filming the burning of Atlanta, but the impresario was still looking for the perfect Scarlett. Selznick’s brother, Myron, was the agent for Laurence Olivier, who was already a movie star. Oliver was Leigh’s lover and engineered events so that Myron would introduce Vivienne to David while the Atlanta stage set blazed, her eyes and porcelain skin glowing. “David,” Myron said, “I want you to meet Scarlett O’Hara.” The passport’s entry in Christie’s catalogue described this as a “Stanley meets Livingstone” moment. On a $2,000 to $4,000 estimate, it went for $30,240. It’s an intimate object and buzzing with the glamour of yore.

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An outrageous new story from Maine. Bernard Langlais (1921–1977) was a sculptor in wood and a Maine original much loved for his whimsical, giant, folksy, wooden outdoor sculptures — Richard Nixon in a swamp; the protagonist in Andrew Wyeth’s Christina World; wild animals; and the 62-foot Skowhegan Indian in Skowhegan, Maine, a one-of-a kind Langlais triumph commissioned in 1970 by the Skowhegan Tourist Hospitality Association to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Maine’s statehood in 1820. It depicts a Wabanaki native outfitted for fishing and was dedicated as a tribute “to the first peoples to use these lands in peaceful ways.” Made of wood and placed outdoors, the sculpture deteriorated over decades but was restored about 15 years ago. Though today it’s by the Cumberland Farms gas station and minimart, it’s a tourist attraction. A lot of Langlais’s work is on view at the Langlais Preserve in Cushing, Maine, where he lived, but his sculptures are to be found throughout Maine, not only in museums but in town halls, roadsides, parks, alleys, and, in this case, a parking lot.

On December 18 and 19, 2023, a terrible wind and rainstorm called the Grinch Storm battered central Maine. For power outages, infrastructure damage, flooding, injuries, and deaths, it was one of the worst storms in Maine’s history. Langlais’s Skowhegan Indian was a casualty. Among other damage, an arm and its jaw were blown to who-knows-where. The local Chamber of Commerce, which now owns the sculpture, can’t afford what is thought to be a $100,000 restoration tab. The thing’s for sale for $1 and a pledge to move it, restore it, and respectfully display it.

No takers yet, but hope springs eternal. Skowhegan is delightful, home not only of Langlais’s Indian but also the Skowhegan School of Art and the Margaret Chase Smith Library, which is also a museum. It’s a real Maine town, not twee at all, but it’s not rich.

Are people intimidated? Do they fear charges of illicit appropriation, racism, othering? A few years ago, the town was traumatized by noisy, insistent demands from the Penobscot Nation to remove the image of a Native American as the mascot of the local high school. The outrage was bolstered by local left-wingers and groups such as the American Psychological Association, now run by loons. The school board folded, of course, and the mascot is now a river hawk. It could have been worse. It could have been a Palestinian watermelon. Maine’s Native tribes do much good, but they’re pressure groups, too, adept at manipulating guilt and grievance. Are the Penobscot honchos badmouthing the salvation of this important work of art?

I hope there’s a foundation or a billionaire with the nətahpənimak, Penobscot for “cajones,” to acquire this sculpture and give it a good home. Right now, it’s facing demise by neglect and moldering by the day.