The "Lost" Klimt: Portrait of Fraulein Lieser, in the pictured in the Auctionhaus im Kinsky showroom ... [+]
It was a rollicking ride through the eighteen lots in the Auktionshaus im Kinsky’s rooms in Vienna’s Kinsky Palais this afternoon, as the star lot, Lot 19, Gustav Klimt’s 1917-8 “Bildnis Fräulein Lieser” or Portrait of Fräulein Lieser, drew exactly $30, 051,789, plus commissions and fees. The price was 50K north of its estimate and quite a respectable one for the artist and for his wares, and the winning bid was in the room, not online or on the phone. To its credit, the money did come quickly to a sort of head in the four long minutes of bidding.
But in the very last two minutes of battle, a certain foggy bit of hesitancy visibly struck the phone lines, the internet and the paddles in the room at once, in a word, the action slowed and the clock began to drag. Seconds matter in this delicate business, and especially in moments like this in big sales, because time itself suddenly seems to turn viscous and stretches to the horizon. To use a shark-fishing metaphor, the sharks that you want to attract to the hook suddenly can’t smell any more blood in the water, and they stop raging after the bait. Everybody around them has stopped, so they get the memo, in shark-speak, and shut down operations. It’s as if the frenzy, itself, increases the value of the bait and literally enforces the genetic command for the sharks to swim after it.
No bidder in the room moved a muscle. By this point, the auctioneer was well aware that they would not. All he needed was one semi-solid bump, 5000 or 10,000 euros, to lend a spark of appetite to the play. Despite his energetic circling back, in German and in English now, to tempt bidders outside the room with more time to deliberate so that they could be persuaded to bump the price up by whatever increment, he did not succeed in budging the price from that last $30-million paddle holder.
For her part, Fräulein Lieser, great young beauty though she remains 106 years after her creation, stayed right on the rung where she was parked, at that precise point in her climb. Finally, giving the push to the proceeding himself, the auctioneer offered, in German now, the traditional last three opportunities to the prospective buyers, at a slightly increased tempo, and coolly closed the sale. Curiously, throughout, he bore no hammer or gavel. There was a smattering of applause as he thanked the assembly and congratulated the new owner, paddle 122, he noted.
Good omens, particularly as to the enduring appetite for anything by Klimt, abounded early on in the sale. Things got off brightly with four studies, drawings in pencil for various famous oils, hit the low $70,00 range. Lot 13, Klimt’s picture of Marie Kerner von Marilaun as a bride, went for well north of $200,000. Moments before, Lot 10, an Egon Schiele aquarelle portrait of his sister Gertrude, with the model’s smouldering stare at the painter providing a charged center to the piece, went climbed easily above $600,000. The sales were fast, and it was hill-and-dale like that.
But in the endgame, hanging cloud-like somewhere over, or within, the sudden hesitancy among the buyers during the sale of the most soulful “Bildnis Fräulein Lieser” was a nagging suspicion that, had the hard-living Klimt lived to physically sign the thing — a classic indication that he thought he was near enough to the end of his meticulous work on any piece of his to stake his godly mark upon it — then the price in this sale would have arguably jumped well above what it remained.
Instead, in his obsessive way, Klimt had clearly wanted to keep working on the thing, which is to say, he hadn’t made his peace with this gorgeous girl as rendered. Parenthetically, his intense work around Fräulein Lieser’s staggeringly expressive eyes, the most nakedly legible and open, narrative part of the figure on display, is a form of artistic perfection, piercing, and deeply heartfelt. That otherworldly ability to render a sitter’s personal narrative is trademark Klimt, and it is the key to his enduring popularity. Klimt paints humans, and specifically women, with great tenderness and focus. And that part of this painting, at least, is finished by any standard and gives the work its immense gravitas, composed of the bloom of youth alongside a deep awareness and a quite few salient questions harbored in this Viennese society girl about what it means to be alive.
It’s just that, in 1918, the man who put all that into the canvas hadn’t quite brought himself to his own hardened ritual of acceptance of it, namely, signing the darn thing. Of course, it was part and parcel of this particularly rebellious man’s gargantuan ego that he assumed he was immortal. The irony will remain that, in 1918, Klimt’s own body chose to rebel against that idea.
